


...You Don't Forget

by BlindSwandive



Series: Evil Like That, You Don't Forget [2]
Category: Tin Man (2007)
Genre: Alien Hand Syndrome, Angst, Domestic Fluff, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rebrainment issues, figuring it out, sturm und drang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-14 15:16:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 57,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15391593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: After Glitch/Ambrose's brain is returned, he begins to remember things he'd rather have left forgotten.New and old cognitive issues remain, but he's not facing them alone this time.  (This is a sequel to "Evil Like That..." but if you're allergic to unhealthy, kinky het, this stands alone just fine.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Avoidance, contrary behavior, and engagement with objects."
> 
> This chapter begins just before surgery, and is done in a kind of vignette style, a collection of small pieces. Mostly sweet. Warnings: An unreliable corpus callosum, alien hand syndrome.

"Okay, this is just. . . really too weird," DG said, but the surgeon snapped at her to hush. His pen scratched on furiously.  
  
"Sorry," she sighed, and backed off, pacing away across the room. From under her breath came, "It's still really weird, though."  
  
Glitch--Ambrose--was murmuring in a steady, quiet stream, and the surgeon was having enough trouble keeping up with him as it was, without having to block out the mutterings of the discontent. The headcase had both palms planted on the glass that was separating him from his brain--at which he was staring with adoration--and Raw had one beside them and the other rested gently on the matted curls, completing the circuit.  
  
And Ambrose, thus connected to himself, was giving instructions to the surgeon.  
  
About reconnecting his brain.  
  
To itself.  
  
DG was having a very hard time keeping quiet about this bizarre arrangement. It made some sense, of course--Ambrose's whole brain was one of the most brilliant in the O.Z., and if anyone would have useful insight on how to undo the damage they had inflicted on him, it would be, well, him, but it didn't make it any less strange.   
  
Cain, at least, was able to restrain himself from a running commentary. He was hanging over the scene with an air of diffuse protectiveness, silent and careful. He didn't really know what he would do, if something happened--or even what might happen, at this stage--but he'd be ready to do something, if it did.   
  
He couldn't imagine doing anything else, being anywhere else.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Cain sat down quietly beside an ashen-faced Glitch, who was waiting outside of the surgical ward.  
  
"What's up?" he asked, with a gentle elbow. "You nervous or something?"  
  
Glitch tried to smile, but it flitted away. "I think--I think some things have happened in my life that I'm not going to like remembering with more regularity and clarity," he said, fiddling with his sterile gown.   
  
Cain patted his back awkwardly, and said, "Me, too."  
  
And when Glitch thought about that for a moment, he leaned over and laid his head on Cain's shoulder.  
  
They sat in silence until one of the surgeons came out of the door and nodded.  
  
"Stay?" Glitch asked helplessly.  
  
"I'm not leaving," Cain promised, and he didn't.  
  
  
***  
  
  
"Count back from one-hu--"  
  
"Nonono, I can't do that. I'd--I'd rather... I'd rather. . . Cain?" he called, helplessly.  
  
"Yeah?" Cain's face, covered carefully under the eyes by a towel, came fuzzily into view.  
  
"Say something?" Glitch pleaded.  
  
"I'll keep an eye out for you. Sweet dreams, sugar."  
  
Glitch closed his eyes and sighed. "Thank you. Sweet dreams, sugar, sweet, sugar..." and this was how he counted until the world faded peacefully away.  
  
  
***  
  
  
"Good morning, sunshine."  
  
"Mn. Wasn't it 'sweetheart,' last time?"  
  
"Just trying to keep you on your toes, princess."  
  
Ambrose 'hmph'ed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.  
  
  
***  
  
  
The zipper was still there.  
  
"In case we have to go back in for further repairs," the quailing surgeon had explained, when Cain had made a somewhat forceful inquiry about it. They'd uncovered the unconscious Ambrose's scalp after a few hours to check for any leakage, and the reality of it was clear to Cain for the first time.  
  
"That's disgusting." He couldn't place why it offended him so much, when the zipper hadn't bothered him beforehand. But now it was a Mark. A scar the man shouldn't have to bear, after all the rest that had happened. Cain bit back bile.  
  
"It's... it's convenient--safer!" the surgeon amended, when it became clear "convenience" was not a good (or safe) reason to give the Tin Man. "If--if just in case--we have to, it will be less traumatic to, ah, open him again."  
  
Cain left to be sick, but after that, he did not leave again.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Ambrose twitched, as he dreamed.   
  
Cain watched, and wondered of what.  
  
  
**********  
  
  
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.  
  
"I don't feel any different," Ambrose insisted, his eyes like a cow's, huge and doleful. He couldn't stop drumming his fingers on the windowsill.  
  
Ratatatatat, ratatatat.  
  
"You realize that you should, though," Cain reminded him. "Which is a sign that you do, actually."  
  
This startled him out of his distraction, though his left hand kept drumming. "What?"  
  
"Well, you remember that you just got your marbles back, don't you?"  
  
"Of course! Anyone with half a--oh."  
  
"Yeah," Cain said, significantly.  
  
"...I guess I do feel a  _little_  different."  
  
"That's what I thought."  
  
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.  
  
  
***  
  
  
"I've realized that my brain has been storing information improperly for the last several annuals," Ambrose was explaining, swinging every step ponderously as they strolled. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back, and he didn't seem able to keep his eyes off of the ground beneath him. "Because my synapses weren't always firing quite right," (Cain let him get away with this understatement) "information wasn't being encoded any more properly than it was being accessed, if you understand what I mean."  
  
"Not exactly," Cain admitted.  
  
Ambrose nodded, considering how to go on. He shuffled his heel against the gravel walk and skipped a step very solemnly. "Well, all right. Imagine that for a period of time, you saw blue and thought it was orange, and saw orange and thought it was blue. Afterwards, you're going to remember having seen orange skies and blue poppies, even once you're seeing correctly again. That's--well, that's a gross oversimplification, but... it has the right feeling, I think."  
  
"Surreal, too. But I can follow it," Cain said, and smiled unevenly, though Ambrose didn't see.  
  
"Or this is a better example," Ambrose went on, dreamily, as if his friend hadn't spoken. "If you kept a filing system, but you didn't have the letter... the letter 'A,' say, you wouldn't file anything under 'A.' You'd file my name under 'M,' perhaps, because that's what comes next, or under 'G' because that makes sense, too. So once you'd learned the letter 'A' and made a place for it, and went to look for all the 'A' names in the world, they'd be scattered throughout the cabinet, and--"  
  
"Yeah," Cain interrupted him, as gently as he could, with a hand on his shoulder, "I think I get it."  
  
Ambrose's eyes darted up, and for a moment he looked like he was pouting, but when he looked away, again (via a glance at Cain's hand), his grin was poorly hidden.  
  
Cain arched an eyebrow suspiciously. "What?"  
  
His laugh was more poorly suppressed than his grin. "Nothing."  
  
  
***  
  
  
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.  
  
"Did I always do this?" Ambrose asked, abruptly, over breakfast.  
  
"No," Cain said, a little too quickly. A little too eagerly. "That's--that's completely new, the, uh, endless. Endless finger drumming. Some kind of glitch," he added, significantly.  
  
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.  
  
"Hm. Well, I can't seem to stop," Ambrose said, unbothered, as he regarded his errant hand.  
  
"No?" Cain looked like he was sinking by centimeters.  
  
"Nope!"  
  
Cain sighed, and nodded.  
  
  
***  
  
  
"I was right-handed," Ambrose explained, as he stirred his tea. "I had a very dominant left brain, you know--have, I suppose. But after all this time without it, I'd gone to relying heavily on my left hand, my right hemisphere. It seems like they're at cross-purposes, sometimes, now. I've got a handle on the right side of my body again, of course," he ting'd the spoon his right hand was holding gently against the cup, to prove it, "but the left sometimes has got a mind of its own. So to speak."  
  
"Ah," Cain said, patiently. "Is, uh, that why it's on my leg?"  
  
"Hmm? Oh, dear."  
  
  
***  
  
  
"Avoidance, contrary behavior, and engagement with objects," Ambrose began, from no where, as he often did.   
  
Cain was getting better at picking up on the trains of thought that barreled through, though, and after assessing the situation, he hazarded a guess. "...Your glitch hand?"  
  
Ambrose was watching his left hand ("the one with the glitch," they were saying now, mostly affectionately) as it hovered over the stone curve of the bridge, not quite touching down on the surface. He'd been experimenting with walking to Cain's left, for once, to spare his walking companion's arm being gripped by his less directable fingers, and the hand had drifted aimlessly since.  
  
"The alien hand has three basic modes," Ambrose confirmed. "Moving away from contact--which it's doing, now--is one. Another is to be contrary--undoing the work of the other hand, like how it pulled back the bowl I pushed towards you, this morning?"  
  
"I remember," Cain began, but Ambrose hadn't really given him a pause, and kept going.  
  
"The third is to use the objects within reach. Unbuttoning the buttons of my coat, picking up pencils..."  
  
"Grabbing me," Cain offered, almost under his breath, but Ambrose's distraction was selective, and this time, he paused.  
  
"Well, yes, there is that," he said, studiously watching his hand float.  
  
Cain smiled.  
  
The next time they walked, he stopped and moved Ambrose bodily to his right, and the glitch hand again seized onto his elbow like an anchor.   
  
When Ambrose pestered him long enough as to why, he admitted, "I just didn't like seeing it wander," and shrugged. "It looked kind of lost."  
  
Ambrose didn't try to spare Cain any more glitches, after that.  
  
  
***  
  
  
"Hey, Ambrose," Cain began, and his tone was a little strange.  
  
"Hmm?" Ambrose was too deep in his book to really look up. He was lying on his stomach with the book pinned under his right elbow, so that he could keep using the hand to pick berries from the bag in front of him. He'd given up on the glitch hand for the moment; it was busily doing whatever it was it felt like doing, apparently to Cain's interest, since the Tin Man's sole activity for the last half hour been to watch it.  
  
"Have you, uh, seen your left hand writing, lately?"  
  
"Mmhmm." Ambrose angled awkwardly for a few more berries.   
  
Cain thought he had an idea, now, of why the man's lips were always stained so dark--he'd eaten half the bag they'd brought out. Sometimes it seemed as though he ate nothing but berries.  
  
After a moment, Cain asked, "So, does it write things that make sense? That you mean?"  
  
"Mm," Ambrose swallowed, "sometimes."  
  
Cain watched him.  
  
Cain waited for him to elaborate. Cain waited for him to address the current situation. Cain waited for him to say  _anything._ But of all the times the man could pick to be quiet...   
  
"So, is this true?" Cain eventually asked, impatient.  
  
"What?" Ambrose blinked, looked up, and finally set the book and berries aside. "What are you talking about, is what true?"  
  
Cain gestured to the space between the tree roots beneath them, where an idle finger had been digging letters in the dirt, and was tracing the phrase there over and again.   
  
"Oh." Ambrose paused to regard his work, considered, and then nodded. "Yes."  
  
And with that, he went back to his book. His left hand was still following the "v."  
  
"You do?"  
  
"Yep."  
  
Cain stared for a moment, but found that he had no more questions, and that he was content to watch the glitch hand swear its master's love for him in the dirt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter involves mental reorganization, berries, cohabitation, a scare, a bath, and an unfair chapter ending. Warnings: A zipper fixation, signs of post-traumatic stress, and very tangled hair.

"Ow," Ambrose hissed, and very consciously disentangled his fingers from his hair.

Cain didn't look up; he was too involved in cleaning each piece of his disassembled gun. But he knew. "Get caught again?"

"Yes," he huffed. "I'm getting better, when I focus, of course--I mean, at least I can let go, sometimes, now--but I wish I wouldn't keep trying to comb my hair." 

Cain nodded the lazy nod of the just-barely-attentive.

This was, apparently, not attentive enough. "The other day, you remember, I had to get your help with prying it open," Ambrose said, and his tone was accusatory, though how that could be Cain's fault was a mystery. "And what are you smiling at?" he snapped, as he rubbed his sore scalp.

"You notice you've been reminding me of things?" 

"...No," Ambrose said, sulkily, but he was mollified.

"Well, you have."

And then Ambrose smiled, too, if just for a moment.

After a quiet, heavy pause, he regarded his stray hand again and admitted, "I think I am going to wind up having to cut it. My hair, I mean." He sounded strangely queasy at the thought. "I mean, it's been a lot of years since it was properly groomed, and I don't know if I'll be able to get it back in order at all, otherwise, on my own. My mats are worse than Raw's."

"You'll think of something," Cain comforted him, idly, and Ambrose did, but he didn't share it then.

"Maybe," he said, as he watched Cain's steady hands at their work. "Maybe."

 

***

 

Ambrose had to admit that grooming, in general, was becoming easier. The waxy, pale, unwashed look was giving way daily to something at least a little healthier, though it was strange next to the deviant crow's nest of hair. His clothing was always clean and mended, and it at least started out completely buttoned, on all fronts, at the beginning of the day, in layer after layer of tiny clasps and delicate buttons that he thrilled to close, because, finally, he could. And if the first few layers came loose, after a while, from the idle glitching, he knew he would at least remain decent in company.

Getting him to change his diet was proving a little more difficult, though. He admitted to Cain, when his friend offered him a pan full of something very animal and very fried, that he'd lived mostly on what he could steal from farms or pick in the woods, for a very long time. Something that wasn't at least very like a nut, a root, or low-growing fruit just didn't seem like real food, anymore. But Cain obliged, and afterwards kept him surrounded by berries, berries that stained his lips and tongue the darkest reds and purples and made him smile very sweetly.

"You're going to make me fat and lazy," Ambrose chided him fondly, one afternoon, halfway down a bowl of blackberries. He could imbibe more fruit sugar than anyone Cain had ever met. "If I'm not foraging for myself, now and then, I'm going to start relying on you for it, and then do nothing but just hide all day and eat the berries you bring me."

Cain, thinking this was a strange pronouncement, just looked at him and waited. They hadn't had too many repeats of that foreign, untalkative behavior he'd witnessed when the glitch hand had Written That Note (which was as much as either would say about it), so this was usually a safe way to get more information.

Ambrose did not disappoint.

"Did you know I kept mice, when I was a child? I love mice. But I had these two, you see, and they were very fond of each other. I always thought they were in love, though that's probably a little silly, since they were both boys--and litter mates--but they still just struck me that way, you know? No, wait, maybe they were girls..." Ambrose paused, to swallow a few more berries. "Anyway, they were the same, and I thought they were boys. I named them Leopold and Rupert. Aren't those good names? Like _Left_ and _Right_? Because they were a matched pair. And they built a nest of all of the shavings and cloth and warm things in their home, and Leopold started staying there, practically all of the time. Rupert spent most of his time there, too, except he'd go out to the food bowl to eat, and he'd bring back food to Leopold, which was very sweet, but eventually Leopold was the size of a pear, you know? He couldn't even walk. He finally stopped coming out at all, he just lived in that warm nest and loved Rupert and stayed away from the big, scary world of the--thing. Terrarium. I was about to say palace, isn't that strange?"

Cain didn't think it was strange at all. For the last three weeks (since the Note Incident), they had, by more or less silent agreement, been sharing a pair of rooms that had been abandoned by a former palace gardener, out at the edge of the royal grounds; Ambrose, who had been spending the bulk of his time just thinking and making notes, trying to piece together the timelines and events of his life by inches, hadn't gone more than ten feet out of them in over a week, unless it was at Cain's side. Even then, it was only with the promise that they wouldn't go far. Cain made a mental note to do something about that, and soon.

"Anyway," Ambrose went on, "when Rupert was gone, Leopold was just fat and lonely and helpless, and could barely manage getting out to the food dish at all. And eventually he just stopped. I tried to put food in his nest, but he wasn't interested. I wasn't hardly Rupert, after all! That was--that was very sad, actually."

Cain nodded, once he was fairly sure the frowning Ambrose had run out of steam. "Okay," he said. "So, in the interest of you not... turning into a fat mouse? Is that what I'm getting? You're going to go on food duty, this week. Or you'll at least make the run for it with me. Got it?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Cain," Ambrose said, with a mock salute that only half hid the uneasiness in his eyes.

"There's a big, scary palace, out there, with an impregnable food cellar, but we've stormed worse together, right?"

"Right!" 

And Ambrose was comforted, for a while.

 

***

 

"Cain..."

This was the first sound that had come out of Ambrose in six hours. 

He had been too deeply involved in "reorganizing his mental filing cabinet" to eat, let alone speak, and had filled twelve sheets with notes, in the process. Cain had thought it better not to interrupt. But now, he dutifully set aside the chair he was adjusting (it had one leg just a little short, and made the chair sit unevenly), and looked up.

"What's up, kitten?"

"Have I ever told you that... that after they took my brain they kept me for a while?" His voice was dry, but his eyes were wide and oddly shiny. He was staring very hard at the wall in front of him, trying very hard not to blink, and he was even doing an almost passable job of keeping his voice calm and even.

But Cain knew a haunted face when he saw one. 

"No," he replied, cautiously, "you haven't said anything about that." He got up off of the floor, dusted himself off, and closed some of the distance between them.

"They did," Ambrose began, and paused, open mouthed and knitting up his forehead, but he couldn't find the words to continue. After a few long moments, he looked helplessly up at the quiet Tin Man, the patient Tin Man.

He looked absolutely lost.

So Cain gathered him awkwardly into his arms and held him safe, until he was still.

 

***

 

It was starting to become a problem.

"It must be better to know, mustn't it?" Ambrose asked, a little shaken by his attempt to follow a flash of memory through to its conclusion. The glitch hand was running a pencil line of static back and forth across the page in front of him, with an alarming dedication. "To remember precisely, and accurately, and linearly, rather than in snatches? That must be better. You can't just... just be derailed by it, so much, then, when it comes to mind. You can't be haunted by a solid body. Right?"

"I don't know about that part," Cain said calmly, polishing scratches out of the table, "Zero was solid. Azkadellia was solid. But it is probably better to know how it went down."

"Was she ever," Ambrose murmured, and sighed, dropping the pencil. His left hand drifted up to feel out his zipper, and Cain looked away politely, but the strange metallic tearing sound, as millimeter by millimeter the teeth let go of one another, was undeniable. "But some theories suggest that simply allowing a trauma to pass can be the less harmful method. That explicitly detailing it over again can further wire in the panic response..."

"But that's a little different, isn't it?" Cain was having a hard time not looking up at the creeping metal tab, and tightened his jaw. "You're not telling some shrink your problems, you're just trying to put your brain back in order in the first place. You're doing it with everything--inventions, getting into the castle, how you lived after you got away, how to get from one place to the next..."

"I suppose that's true," Ambrose said, and his eyes closed, as the zipper finally stopped, and he laid his head back over the chair. His trembling had finally ceased. "I wish it was just a cabinet," he mumbled, and sighed out the last of his tension. "Then I could just glance at the headings and tuck them into the right places. Lock up the drawers I don't like..."

When Cain glanced up, to follow the floating gestures of Ambrose's hands as he mimed filing, cold sweat pricked the back of his neck. The man before him looked taken apart; there was a new macabre, beatific look on his face, and his limbs were draped bonelessly down around him like a ragdoll, the effect some terrible cross between vulnerable, broken, and sexed.

Where had that come from?

A little helplessly, Cain said, "Ambrose, you, uh, opened your..."

This, at least, roused Ambrose somewhat from whatever musing had taken him away, and he rolled his head to the side to look at his companion. "Does it make you uncomfortable?"

"A little," Cain admitted.

"Oh..." Self-consciously, sighing, Ambrose collected himself more into the upright and began to zip himself back up.

"Wait, Glitch, I mean--if you... I guess if you're more comfortable that way..."

Ambrose caught Cain's slip before he did, and gave him a hard look as he finished primly closing his skull.

"...Ambrose. I meant."

And he softened again. "I know. Well, I'm sorry it upsets you. I wish I could show you how it feels, though... So you could understand it... "

"You realize that would involve breaking my skull?"

Ambrose smiled down at the table. "I wouldn't want to do that. But it's very liberating, somehow, feeling so... open. Exposed. It's scary, too."

Cain coughed, not sure how they'd gone from the benefits and pitfalls of remembering the past to indecent exposure. "People usually open different zippers, when that's what they're after," he said, in an attempt at humor.

But a shadow passed over Ambrose, and he looked out through half-lidded eyes. "It's not all that different. The release and shift of pressure, the freeing of delicate tissue... I've had them both opened at once. It's a very vulnerable position."

Cain nodded, trying not to tie that new information in with the rest--with Glitch's imprisonment by Azkadellia, with wandering alone in the woods, with whatever else could have befallen him in his past--but it was difficult. Especially with the strange, serious look Ambrose was now turning on him, as his glitch hand made a trail of open buttons down its owner's stomach.

"Well," Cain began, but now his mouth was so dry he had to swallow and start again. "You're, uh, safe here, Ambrose. You don't have to feel vulnerable."

And when Ambrose gave him a shadow of a bittersweet smile, he knew at once that there were a lot of things Ambrose could teach him that would be scarier than the erotic openness of a cracked skull.

 

***

 

That night, Cain woke up with his gun already reflexively in his hand, pointing at a figure in the dark, who was kneeling on the end of his bed.

"Can you put that away, Tin Man?" Ambrose asked, tiredly, and Cain sighed with relief and did. He even braced himself and shifted over to make room up beside him, but Ambrose didn't take it. Cain was about to ask what he wanted, if it wasn't that, but the shadow sank, and the warm weight of his friend collided with the side of his leg.

Ambrose had curled up at the end of the bed.

Cain didn't ask, and just folded his blanket down over his friend. In a few minutes, they were both asleep again.

 

***

 

"Cain," Ambrose asked thickly, from under the blanket, the next morning, "would you help me wash my hair?"

 

***********

 

The bathroom was full of steam.

"It's tough to keep the zipper from getting too wet or soapy," Ambrose was rambling, "and my dexterity was very poor with my right hand, before? But now my left hand is unreliable, so it's going to be even harder if I try to do it alone. Plus it's been tangling for so long, that I don't even know if it's really still together, in there. I mean, my hair could be held on by sheer willpower, by now, for all I know. Maybe it would just be easier with short hair, just cutting it off, but if you'd only seen me with my proper hair, before, clean, dashing--"

The sound of the tap stopping in the tub startled him into quiet.

"I'll be careful with you," Cain promised, with only a little condescension. "Just get in."

"Well... okay," Ambrose said, and was only barely stopped from climbing in with all his clothing by a quiet cough from Cain. 

"Oh. Right. Well. That would have been embarrassing." He immediately set into the clasps of his shirt cuffs, as he toed his shoes and socks off. "Actually, it _was_ embarrassing, I mean, you knew I was about to, didn't you? And that's almost the most embarrassing part, isn't it?" Ambrose prattled as he worked his buttons--an army of buttons, a multitude of buttons!--and stared determinedly at the hot water. "But it's--you build strange habits when you're wandering around without a home and with only half a brain for several years," he said, all false cheer and over-fast pace. "Sometimes I forget. I mean, I think the last time I was in a real tub, before coming back to the palace, it was Azkadellia's, and she was the one w-washing my hair for me." He dropped his coat and shirt aside, and pretended he hadn't stammered.

"And that's--that's funny to think of," he insisted, with no real conviction. "Isn't it?" He slid his trousers and underwear down and stumbled out of them, catching his balance on the wall.

And when Cain rested an uneasy palm on his bare waist to steady him, Ambrose jumped a full foot, and spun on his friend, his eyes wild and unseeing.

Cain stepped back cleanly and raised his hands, open, surrender-style, but his pale eyes were searching. Ambrose looked trapped, and his chest was heaving with the effort of breathing; why did this suddenly feel like a hostage situation? 

Cain waited. He didn't say a word or move, for several achingly tense minutes, until he felt the tug of the glitch hand on his belt loop, and lowered his eyes to it. The knuckle was white.

He supposed that was as good a sign as he was going to get. So he moved one hand slowly down towards it, as he raised his eyes again and very quietly asked, "You know I'm not going to hurt you, right?" When there was still no sign of recognition, he wrapped his fingers with care around the sweating palm. 

And with that, Ambrose deflated, and sagged until he was sitting on the edge of the tub. Once his eyes swam back into focus, he stared at the floor.

"Hey, now..." Cain said, softly, "you're awful spooked, but you're safe." He squeezed the hand reassuringly.

"I'm--I'm glitching again," Ambrose whispered, disconsolate, "I've forgotten where I am. It seems like I was just somewhere else, a moment ago..."

"...Sounds a little like a flashback," Cain said, soothingly. "I don't think you _were_ here, for a while there." He sighed. "Well, you're in the--in our bathroom. In the 'Garden Cottage,'" (the quoting was audible--he never could bring himself to admit he lived in something called a cottage) "on the palace grounds. Which is where you and me kinda' live together," he explained, with as much masculine indifference as he could manage. He cleared his throat quickly and added, "So, uh, why don't you just get in the water, might calm you down."

Ambrose nodded uncertainly, but he was soothed, and he clambered in with no grace at all, sinking lower and lower until he was in up over his chin. "And you're going to wash my hair?"

"Right. You're okay, sweetheart."

"Okay," Ambrose agreed, faintly, and closed his eyes, as he let his head fall back in Cain's hands and into the water.

***

In an hour, the water was cold, and there were tears in Ambrose's eyes, from laughter. And, of course, from the sting of the comb caught in one of the holdout knots he claimed was still made of hair, in the face of Cain's growing doubts.

The farce that was their attempt at unwinding the mats in a gentle, cooperative fashion, with a bottle of conditioner and the finest tooth comb they'd been able to borrow from the palace (and which they had subsequently mangled), had eventually put them into the kind of desperate hysterics that a morning of stress sometimes makes necessary. And somehow, they _had_ managed to convince about three-quarters of the hair to turn back into curls, _real_ curls, that twisted madly as they dried but didn't stick straight out and stiff of their own accord.

"Okay, princess, another ten minutes, and then I swear it's time for the scissors," Cain warned, hoarse from unaccustomed laughter.

"That's--that's okay," Ambrose gasped, "I think I'm running out of scalp that still works. I won't miss a couple of pieces that aren't on top."

"Thank gods," Cain breathed.

And by the end, they had soaked Cain's clothing, broken the comb, clogged the drain nearly irreparably, and sacrificed four (fairly) inconspicuous pieces of hair. And when Ambrose more fell than stepped out of the tub, it was sopping, into Cain's arms. Cain held him very tightly, and Ambrose kissed his shoulder so lightly it almost wasn't.

That night they did share a bed, lying chastely back to back, but by midnight, Cain had twisted to wrap his arms around his companion, and by morning, Ambrose was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of Leopold and Rupert is taken directly from experience with my own sweet little brown mice, Simon and Michael (who did turn out to be female). They were the softest mice I've ever pet, and loved each other quite a lot.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes disappearances, manual labor, exhaustion, denial, rain, and tentative affection. Warnings: A little bit of heartbreak. Signs of things starting to unravel.

Cain muzzily registered that he was cold.

The sense of "not right"ness came soon after, so he started down a mental list of wrongness to find the ultimate source. He was cold; he was facing the wrong direction; there was a glass of water on the wrong side of the bed; there was a dark hair on the pillow--

Ambrose was gone.

"Ambrose?" he called immediately, before he'd even vaulted himself into the upright. He had changed into day clothes and holstered his gun in two minutes--he couldn't hear any movement in the little--place--of theirs. But he checked it thoroughly, circled the perimeter twice, and tried to tell himself he was legitimately worried about lone wolf, assassin types, rather than just panicking wildly over his--friend--not being where he'd left him.

There were no signs of fighting, nothing changed, nothing missing. Out of a dutiful attempt at optimism (for Ambrose's sake), Cain trekked first to the palace, to check the kitchens and cellars, but his reward for this was only the joyless satisfaction that his pessimism was more sensible, this time, after all. So he left quickly, scanned the area for any hint of where to begin, and tried to ignore the hard knot in his stomach that, had he been a less measured man, he might have taken for genuine fear of losing Ambrose.

And then he decided he might not be as measured as all that, and ran.

***

After an hour of what he wouldn't admit was frantic searching, Cain found Ambrose deep in the stand of woods nearest their... place, sitting in a tight ball behind the base of a gnarled tree. There were tiny tears in his purple nightclothes and twigs in his hair, and little scratches marked his hands. His feet were bare.

Cain sat down heavily beside him.

Neither spoke. 

Once he'd mostly caught his breath, Cain reached across his--friend--and collected his hand, drawing it over and flattening it out on his own chest. He held it there under his hand while he wordlessly examined some of the cuts on Ambrose's pale wrist; his heart was still beating so hard that he could feel it right through their stacked palms.

Ambrose swallowed, and looked at the ground. After a long moment, he spoke very quietly. "It's going to run out of ticks if you keep winding it that tight."

Cain considered this. "Are you going to keep disappearing on me?"

"Maybe," Ambrose admitted, so softly it hurt.

Cain nodded, somberly. "Then I guess I can't guarantee the old gears will hold out too long."

And Ambrose laid his head on Cain's shoulder and closed his eyes. "If I break your heart, Tin Man, I promise I'll build you a new one."

Cain sighed, and leaned his head against Ambrose's, the cold zipper biting his cheek. "Thanks. But best we try to avoid that, all right? Just... leave me a note, or something."

"All right."

***

Ambrose didn't know when he'd left the bed in the first place, but he admitted that it had still been black out, and that it wasn't any lighter by the time he'd stopped under that tree, so Cain determined that it had been too early and that he needed more rest. And he enforced it. When they got home, he put Ambrose into the bath, and then back to bed--Cain's bed, in Cain's nightclothes--with no more than a dozen words altogether, and set up watch over him, stern and immobile.

Ambrose didn't seem to mind, too much. He tossed and fidgeted, at first, but when he hid his face in the pillow, and pulled the nightshirt up over his nose, to breathe through it, sleep overwhelmed him in no time at all. It was a deep, still sleep, and Cain found that he could just watch the perfect, subtle circle of Ambrose's breathing, and be content.

After a few hours had passed, Cain finally did decide that it was safe to move, but he only shifted as far as the floor, abandoning his chair to work on it. He never let more than a few minutes go by without looking up to check on his ward, though, and he always kept him within the periphery of his vision.

And so it startled Cain, when Ambrose spoke surprisingly clearly and wakefully into the silence, around midday. "That's ironic." He hadn't seen him stir at all.

"Well, welcome back. What is?"

Ambrose smiled, and gestured vaguely to the chair leg Cain was adjusting ( _this_ one was too long). "None of our chairs have all feet on the floor. They're as unbalanced as... as..."

The amusement was fading from Ambrose's face, and all at once he looked tired, so Cain didn't wait for him to finish. "They'll get better," he said, firmly. "Just takes some vigilance. Eventually, everything in this place'll be steady on its feet and standing straight all on its own."

"You think so?"

"I do."

There was a rustle from the bed, as Ambrose burrowed a little, into the pillow. "I thought I was the wide-eyed optimist, here..."

Cain bristled. "Now, I'm not being optimistic. There's a difference between blind optimism, thinking something will just happen, and real determination to make it happen. Working for it."

Ambrose hid his smile in Cain's shirt. "So, in other words, you're being stubborn," he said, muffled.

"Yes."

"Cussed, you might say."

"Yep." 

"Hard-headed?"

"Yes, look," Cain said, strained, "stubbornness, cussedness, I'm fine with that. Unwavering dedication to the cause. Vigilance. Whatever."

"Just so long as it's grown-up, Tin Man things," Ambrose confirmed.

A little uneasily, Cain agreed. "Yes."

"...Boy Scout stuff."

"Now don't you start up again with that... You better be glad I'm a--boy scout," he repeated, a little chagrined once he realized what he was saying. "I don't exactly see you playing the woodsman, out chopping firewood for us. Can you even hold an axe?"

"Well..."

"--That's what I thought. You need me to do that." Cain puffed up, a little, and shifted into commanding officer mode. "So either go back to sleep, or make us some lunch, and let me finish my boy scout stuff."

Ambrose raised his eyebrows, in feigned shock, but crawled obediently up and out of bed. "Well, if _that's_ how it is..."

"It is."

"Well!" he huffed. "Okay!"

"Okay."

"Fine..."

" _Food,_ Ambrose," Cain reminded him, and Ambrose scurried. In moments, a familiar confused clanging started up in the next room. 

And when Cain was certain he was hidden, he laid his forehead on the chair, sighed, and started drawing up a battle plan.

***

It worked, for a while.

Ambrose pretended to be utterly offended by Cain's new habit of keeping him on a tight leash, directing his day for him, but he thrived. Cain, who didn't let him sit and dwell, who didn't let him out of his sight, who kept him busy and productive and moving, had taken the unbearable responsibility away. Ironically enough, by assigning responsibilities.

Ambrose was preparing meals. Ambrose was mending clothing, too, but as soon as he quipped about feeling like "some prairie wife," Cain took that away from him and put him under the sink, to fix the leaks, instead. While Cain replaced worn boards, chopped wood, sanded dents, braced tables, and balanced chairs, Ambrose wired and rewired lights, tightened pipes, irrigated the surrounding garden, and replaced corroded fuses ("Wouldn't that be convenient? If they just came in a box?"). They were busy. They had a mission.

And if the mission was only to feel like they had a mission, and to leave no room for thought, then so be it.

And for three days, it worked--for three days _they_ worked, until they finally ached too much to think, and were too tired to sleep, and then they lay on the floor on their backs and stared at the ceiling, empty.

"Thank you," Ambrose said, after a long time, and then too numb to worry, he rolled up onto an elbow and over Cain, and kissed him.

***

The next morning, when Ambrose had disappeared from his arms, again, Cain was at least comforted to find a note in embellished script:

_Berries - be back soon - A._

And, trying to convince himself that it was real, and that there was nothing to worry about, Cain put himself together, and tried to cover up the strange silence of the place.

He rinsed, standing, in the tub, and let the cold water fall in handfuls to smack into the porcelain. The frying pan spat loudly with the grease of eggs and flesh and strange peppers. He hammered a few more boards into place. He listened to the clock that ticked too loudly to sleep to so they kept it over the stove, instead, and to his own heartbeat.

And when there came the hop and shuffling scrape of boots being pulled off at the door, he closed his eyes and breathed.

"...and you wouldn't believe the dasaberries, either--I almost didn't, except I picked them, and they're in the basket. Well, what's left of them. I guess I ate a lot of them on the way home. But there are still some, and there are plenty of blackberries and myla nuts."

The basket fell on the table, in front of Cain, with the "tst" of wicker, as Ambrose crossed to the sink. The glitch hand snuck out and rubbed Cain's short hair back the wrong way, as he passed.

"Oh, gods, you were frying things again, weren't you? You know the smell doesn't come out, from the oil. We'd better open the windows. Try some of those berries, okay? Have you ever had a dasaberry? They're incredibly local, but they're like honey and lemon rind and they burn, and I love them. You know, the Queen once had a large banquet's dessert course consist entirely of port and dasaberries, it was the most decadent thing I've ever seen, there were a hundred people scouring the woods for a week, before hand."

Cain blew the dust from a berry and ate it, and then got up to open the windows.

"You know, I would do that, if we had someone in. I would look for dasaberries, for us, but I'd have to make you help me, this has just done a number on me, I'll tell you that for nothing. It feels like my shoulder's come loose..."

And Cain took Ambrose's abandoned coat from the chair and hung it up, and Cain washed the basket full of berries, and Cain poured him a glass of milk, and then he sat down to watch and listen while Ambrose talked and ate berries for an hour and wouldn't look up at him.

***

"Ow, ow..." Ambrose hissed, and then cursed, as Cain muscled an elbow into his shoulder, that night. 

"Sorry." Cain backed off the pressure a little, but kept working on the knots. This was the first time all day that Ambrose had let him within arm's distance, let alone with his back turned, and he wasn't prepared to let the opportunity pass. 

He still hadn't seen Ambrose's eyes, though.

And Ambrose had not stopped talking. Cain had decided he was running interference. "It's not fair--the glitch hand kept dropping the basket, so I had to carry that, and then I couldn't get it to pick berries, either, it just kept crushing them and feeding them to me, so it was just over and over, move the basket, dig into the bush, move the basket, dig into the bush, all one-handed, for an hour, at odd angles, and of course I've done the bulk of my work around _here_ with my right arm, too, and it never healed properly in the first place, so it was just too much for one poor little shoulder, after a while. I'm not built for this kind of thing. Stamina is not my forte. I'm like a cheetah--I'm capable of fantastic, short bursts of incredible strength and speed, but make me pull a cart and I'm done for."

Cain took a moment to dig backwards through the melodrama until he found it: "Wait, healed properly?"

"What?"

"You hurt your shoulder," Cain prompted. "I didn't know you had any--uh, any other war wounds," he caught himself, as he looked at the zipper below.

"Oh," Ambrose replied, a little faintly. "It was dislocated, and there was a lot of tissue damage. I didn't spend long enough favoring it while it was healing. Most of the time it's fine, but I feel it when I've overdone it."

"Ah. How'd it happen?" Cain asked, as casually as he could, as he rubbed circles into the shoulder with the heel of his palm.

"I..." And almost immediately, Ambrose yelped, as his muscles seized. "Oh, gods, ow--"

Interference. 

Cain sighed and backed off. "Okay. Let's get you into a hot bath, kitten."

"Cheetah," Ambrose grumbled, as he trundled out of the chair, cradling his arm against his chest.

"Close enough."

***

Cain left Ambrose in the scalding bath, while he trekked out to the palace cellars for a jug of something red and numbing. Ambrose had turned down the amber rotgut Cain had proferred, but Cain wasn't really surprised by that, and had offered to go fetch something easier. He thought it was a wonder the man's teeth weren't as permanently purple as the rest of his mouth, though, between the fruit and the wine.

The darkness felt solid, somehow, while he crossed the field. The air was thick and damp, and the purple warning of thunder loomed. All day, above them, there had been the strange bright light of clouds, washing the landscape out into white and grey, but the moons did not come out and the clouds had turned black with the hour. And when Cain stepped back out of the palace, they opened up and bore down on him.

"Of course," he muttered, pulled his coat over his head against the downpour, and ran flat out across the grounds.

***

He was drenched to the bone, when he stepped back into the bathroom with a pair of wooden cups. The steaming one he handed to Ambrose, who sighed gratefully and sank into it, and the rotgut he set on the counter before peeling off his coat and hanging it up to dry. He was no less wet for this. Water still dripped from the end of his nose.

When another drop smacked the floor, where Ambrose was watching Cain's feet, he exclaimed, "You're wet!" and Cain sighed. 

"Yeah, it's, uh, raining pretty hard out there. Didn't you hear the thunder?"

Ambrose didn't answer, but his eyes flicked up to Cain's face as he shifted to one end of the tub. "You'll catch your death, Cain, you'd better get in."

"I... I don't know, maybe I'll just dry off and change..."

"Cain," Ambrose said sharply, finally looking him in the eye, and that was enough.

Ruddy with embarrassment and chill, Cain swallowed half his glass, peeled off his sopping clothes, and stepped awkwardly into the tub, across from its occupant. He sat and shifted until he was almost comfortable, not quite sitting on the drain and not quite poking his shoulder with the faucet, but it meant his knees were folded in with Ambrose's. Their feet were only narrowly avoiding uncomfortable introductions, and the water was troublingly clear.

But after an awkward silence, Ambrose straightened up and crawled through the water to turn and lie against Cain, sitting between his knees with his back to the other man's chest. 

"It's okay," he promised, as Cain froze, and the glitch hand stroked its knuckles fondly over a knee. "It's okay."

Cain closed his eyes tightly, but relaxed by inches, eventually resting his chin down onto the metal zipper, damp with condensation. And after several minutes had passed in this fragile comfort, he let his arms slide back into the tub, and finally around the pale body there, careful not to jostle the half emptied cup Ambrose was still holding in his right hand.

"Is this okay?" Cain asked, his voice a little unsteady.

And Ambrose whispered, "Yes." 

Cain closed his eyes again. After another minute or so, he lifted his head from Ambrose's, and sank a little further into the water, shifting the man closer to him as he lay his chin gently down over the sore shoulder, instead. His arms slipped lower, too, and folded across the softest part of Ambrose's belly, tucked under the other man's elbows.

"Is this?" he murmured, and Ambrose nodded, laying his head back onto Cain's shoulder.

The glitch hand weaved up and around them, then, until the errant fingers could reach into Cain's hair. "I could love you so much," Ambrose sighed.

Cain couldn't bear to ask what that meant.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes kissing, let down, that Damn Tree, food, unhealthy behavior, a little steaminess, and a revelation of the past. Warnings: Dark, my darlings, bleak. Heartache, lack of self-care, unraveling. (Things have to get worse before they can get better, right?) A couple cookies for readers of "Evil Like That."

Cain woke up shaking.

The night before, Ambrose had kissed him--really kissed him, a kiss bigger than ten years. The glitch hand had pulled at him, where they lay in the tub, after that wonderful, horrible pronouncement, and Cain had prayed, closed his eyes, and tried to swallow Ambrose whole, to quell his own fear of it. They shifted and strained, at first, but once this had settled, they just clutched one another blindly and mashed their mouths until the water had turned so cold that they shook apart with shivering.

They'd stumbled out of the tub, together, then, and were only mostly dry by the time they found refuge in the bed, in the wrong nightclothes, and there they clung, and kissed again, and laughed at themselves, all nerves. Ambrose's heart was beating like a bird's, so he took Cain's palm to show him, but it trembled so badly that it was hard to tell where the tremor ended and the pulse began.

Cain had never been so happy to shake.

But now, it startled him from the uneasy peace he'd built on the night. And on the heels of the shuddering, he found "cold," and "empty," because Ambrose had disappeared, again.

Cain found the door open, creaking on its hinges in the grey breeze of morning, and the chill had scared all of the warmth from the cottage. No wonder he'd woken so cold, then. And this time, there was no note on the table--or anywhere around it (Cain checked, in case the draft might have blown it away), so he got dressed and walked into the woods, through the weak drizzle, until he found the old twisted tree (near a dasaberry bush, he noticed), and Ambrose asleep, there, in the carpet of dead leaves around it. Cain carried him home.

He managed to get the damp and half-conscious Ambrose into something dry, and into bed, and then left him there, while he went around the place, setting out pans for the leaks in the roof. When he thought he had found them all, he closed the door to the bedroom, and sat down on the other side of it, to count the drips as they fell.

***

Two hours past midday, carefully dressed and groomed, Ambrose cracked the door to peek out. Cain was set up like a guard in his path, slouched in his chair with his back to the bedroom and his attention on nothing Ambrose could identify from there.

He took a deep, bracing breath, and opened the door. When Cain didn't look around, he squeezed out around Cain's chair and sank to his knees beside it, reaching to gather one of the the Tin Man's hands into his own.

He bowed to kiss the knuckle of Cain's smallest finger. He kissed the depression on the back of Cain's wrist. He kissed the tip of Cain's thumb, and a tiny scar on his forefinger. Finally, he closed his eyes and laid his cheek on Cain's knee, and waited.

Cain startled awake with a sharp breath through his nose.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, gathered his bearings, and then looked down at the head on his knee. 

"Hey," he said, hoarse from sleep, and squeezed the hands that held his. 

Ambrose fervently kissed his wrist again, and closed his eyes. "Forgive me," he whispered.

"Hey, come on..." Cain evaded. "What am I, the Queen...?" He patted Ambrose's shoulder, stiffly. "Hey, get up, come on."

Ambrose nodded and watched the floor as they both clambered up to their feet.

Cain rubbed the back of his neck, cricked from dozing upright. "How's your shoulder?"

Ambrose squirmed visibly. "Sleeping under a tree in the rain didn't help it any, but it's a little better than it was." His ironic smile was for his knees, as he bent to dust them. "Thank you."

Cain nodded. "Sure. Well, we, uh, ought to go get some more food, but I get the feeling it'll be easy enough if we hit the cellar, today, rather than try to go hunt and gather it ourselves."

Ambrose flinched ever-so-slightly at what he thought might be an ever-so-slight reproach, but he nodded. "Let's go, then."

"All right." So they grabbed two sacks and walked to the palace in silence.

***

They were both tense and uneasy, bristling like dogs before a storm. Even packing up food seemed complicated.

They worked quietly, at first. Ambrose dutifully portioned out rice, potatoes, beans, grains--the few foods he'd become willing to apply heat and water to, but only just--while Cain collected from the larder. But the glitch hand just as dutifully undid any of Cain's work that it could reach, removing the eggs from his bag or plucking out the paper-wrapped packages of meat and trying to hide them (though it did a poor job of it).

When Cain had unburied the bacon from the rice barrel for the third time, he caught the errant wrist firmly in his hand, and held it down at Ambrose's side. "Now, that's about enough of that," he said, relatively calmly, after a deep breath.

"What? Cain, what are you doing?" Ambrose asked, scandalized, stepping away to arm's length.

"I'm just trying to keep the food in the bag and out of the barrels."

"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about," Ambrose demurred, and set back to one-handedly gathering bundles of string-beans, steadfastly ignoring the imprisonment of his left hand.

"Well I'm sure you don't, but we need a little meat in our diets, and your hand there seems to disagree."

"Of course it does. A human doesn't actually need to eat meat, if he balances his grains and legumes. And there are plenty of other good sources of protein."

Cain stared blankly.

"But you're welcome to take those things home," Ambrose continued, diplomatically.

Cain shook his head slowly, his mild irritation washed away by sheer stunned disbelief. "You're kidding."

Ambrose ignored _this_ as well, and just continued gathering vegetables.

"Or you're mad."

"Look, Cain, it's your health. Really. I'm sorry the hand was interfering."

"Now wait, what do you mean by 'it's my health?'"

But Ambrose's self-control was only so great. "Well, since you _asked_..."

He talked while he gathered fruit and Cain repacked his bag; through marking down the amounts they'd taken on the inventory sheets and filling out a note to the stockers to get more berries; his lecture continued up the stairs, and it continued out into the halls.

It finally stopped, abruptly, about ten yards from the doors, along with Ambrose.

Cain shook himself out of the Ambrose-speech-daze and stopped to look at him. "Ambrose...?"

When Ambrose only gaped, Cain followed his line of sight to the end of the corridor, where a sweep of dark hair and powder blue satin were disappearing around the corner.

"Oh."

Ambrose looked terrified. His brow was knit, and he mouthed on the air like he was trying to speak, but he couldn't. Cain went to put a hand on his back, to comfort him, but he noticed in time the signs of panic--the wet, glassy eyes, the pinpoints of sweat on Ambrose's forehead, the way his ribs were lifting higher and higher with each breath--and thought better of it. Carefully, he reached to touch the glitch hand (Ambrose didn't always feel it), and it seized on his fingers fit to break them. And so, like he was towing a boat, Cain tugged Ambrose carefully out of the corridor, through the obscure side door, and back out onto the sprawling grounds towards their home.

For a few minutes, Ambrose was just a shuffling, gasping weight at the end of his arm, but his grip eventually relaxed, and by the time they were halfway home, Ambrose had let go entirely, to switch the bag from his sore right shoulder to his left, and was leading. He led right past the cottage, in fact, not even slowing down as he abandoned the bag carelessly beside the door. Cain set his bag down, too (but with more care, for the eggs) and then had to trot to catch up, again.

"Ambrose?" he asked once he was beside him, "Where are we going?" But there was no response. At least Ambrose had stopped hyperventilating.

They followed a path along the edge of the woods they'd taken so many times that either of them could have walked it blind, so Cain watched Ambrose, instead. Ambrose stared fixedly ahead, not appearing to really register his surroundings, but he was drawing his right arm further and further into the cradle of his left, like it was a sling. When they were far enough away that they wouldn't have been able to see the palace through the trees, he finally slowed to an easier pace, and breathed a little more steadily, but there was a sickness about him, a darkness in his eyes.

Cain felt afraid, to see it, though he put that thought away as irrational. Still, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

"We used to walk this way all the time," he tried, slowly, just to interrupt the silence, but Ambrose was too far away, somehow. He just slowed a little, as they approached the old stone bridge, but even this he looked at it with unfamiliar eyes.

Ambrose drifted up the path until he'd reached the pinnacle of the arch, and there he stopped, staring down blankly into the brook below. When Cain stepped up beside him, to lean over and watch the water swirl, Ambrose looked away. He let his arm come down from its "sling" and fanned his fingers along the stone until he had a good hold to brace himself with, and then in one, unsteady push, he was up, swinging one leg over to straddle the wide, sturdy stone.

He was facing away from his companion, but Cain could tell he was hugging his arm close to his chest, again. He wondered how badly it hurt him. 

He almost asked, but Ambrose spoke for the first time since the spectre had knocked him out of the loop of the world, and Cain didn't dare interrupt. 

"Do you know how high up I am?" he murmured, sing-song, as he stared up at the grey sky.

"From the water to your seat? Maybe ten feet."

"Something like that..."

Ambrose lay back quietly on the stone and Cain could see the strange, faraway look in his eyes, the sourness around his mouth. The glitch hand was hugging his arm close, like a wounded thing not its own, and he whispered, "What am I doing?"

Cain shook his head slowly, at a loss. "You're lying on the bridge, worrying me a little." He coughed quietly, and folded his arms tight across his chest, because the wind had come up, cold. "You, uh, want to head back home, maybe?"

Ambrose smiled, just faintly (and briefly), and as if in response, he said, "She pushed me off a balcony." His voice was eerily calm, but his glitch fingers dug into his right arm, white-knuckled, pulling it down by the elbow. 

So that was how he'd dislocated that shoulder. 

"Fifteen feet up. And I'm so afraid of heights, Cain..."

Cain grimaced, and wrapped a hand on Ambrose's left elbow, which was nearer. "Maybe you should come off there," he said, as kindly and firmly as he could.

Ambrose drew a sharp breath, and Cain thought he might have hurt him somehow, but Ambrose's expression wasn't right, for that. Not quite. When he sighed out his breath, his mouth was open in an almost-smile. 

"Maybe you should come up here," he said, with a small, joyless laugh, and drew his knee up from the precipice, to rest his foot on the ledge and angle his body just slightly towards Cain.

Cain had seen this, before, this dark languor, the last time Ambrose had opened his skull, but now it was tinged with heat and ache. He looked away.

"Come on," Cain muttered, "let me help you down."

Ambrose did let Cain brace him, until he was sitting upright and had swung his right leg down beside his left, but he didn't pull himself forward from the ledge. He wrapped his arms loosely around Cain's neck, instead, and pulled the man up against the wall, in between his knees, his hips leveled with Cain's stomach.

Cain wrapped his arms securely around Ambrose's waist, to steady him, but when he started to lift him down, Ambrose gasped, and leaned back. "Wait."

Cain obeyed, but he shifted uncomfortably from the hard swell pressing at the hollow below his ribs. He thought very hard about the cold stone he was up against, praying it would distract him.

"What kind of fate is this?" Ambrose whispered helplessly, as he bowed his head onto Cain's, letting his fingers snake through the pale blond hair at the back of his skull. "What's wrong with me?" His fingers were trembling.

Cain shook his head only slightly, and closed his eyes, breathing the still slightly damp, earthy smell of Ambrose through the clean green linen of his coat. "You're just... just kinda' mixed up right now," he said, thinking the same might be true of himself. "That's all."

Ambrose's legs wrapped around him, then, his ankles locking over Cain's bottom and pulling him up flush. "Right... Okay... Mixed up..."

Cain clutched him a little too tightly, his fingers digging into Ambrose's sides. The man seemed so small and fragile in his arms!

"Let me get you off this bridge," Cain begged, his voice almost nothing, "let me take you home."

Ambrose tipped Cain's hat back, to kiss his hair and his forehead. "Just so long as you take me somewhere."

Cain flushed guiltily when this filled him with more than pity. He could hear his pulse in his ears.

"Home," he repeated, and pulled Ambrose down from his perch, bearing his weight until the man finally relented and unlocked his ankles, sliding to his feet. They both breathed deeply to steady themselves. 

When the arms around his neck wouldn't let go, though, and clutched tighter, Cain insisted, "Come on, sweetheart, I smell rain," but Ambrose didn't move until a cold drop slid down the inside of his collar.

"It's raining," he said, then, weakly.

Cain agreed patiently and gripped his hand, starting off down the path. And by the time they could see the cottage, they were running, to get out of the downpour.

***

"I think they're gonna' be okay, if we let them dry out," Cain was saying, as he spread the somewhat dampened grains out on towels. "Maybe see if we can cook the wet ones right away..."

Ambrose wasn't responding.

"Think it's about time for dinner?" Cain asked. "Maybe we can do them in."

"Hm. Maybe," Ambrose muttered, after a pause. "Or maybe it was the bush..."

Cain blinked and turned around to look at him, for this non-sequitur. "What?"

Ambrose had stripped down to his trousers, and was rubbing dejectedly at a long scratch on his belly. "I don't know where I got it, to tell you the truth."

Cain closed his eyes, as Ambrose slid the rest of his clothing off, as well. "Okay. But, uh, what about eating some of this stuff?"

"Hm..? Oh. I don't feel like eating," he mumbled.

"You haven't eaten all day," Cain protested.

Ambrose shrugged, but Cain missed it. He felt Ambrose's arms slinking around his neck, though, and the damp, clean bareness of his body, as it leaned against him heavily (Cain was still in his wet clothes). Ambrose's breath warmed his shoulder, but his tone was bleak. "I starve."

Cain uncertainly wrapped his arms around Ambrose. He couldn't think of anything to say to that, but he had goose-flesh he wasn't sure all came from the chill.

"I want to starve," Ambrose murmured, despondent. "I want to ache."

"That's--" _terrible,_ Cain thought, but caught it in time. "...You should still eat," he said, lamely.

But Ambrose only slid down Cain to the floor, and looked up at him, longing, a base thing on his knees. He _looked_ hungry. He looked like desperation barely contained by resignation.

Cain hurt to see him, the terrible openness of him. Ambrose was utterly unguarded.

He sank to his knees, too, then, and took Ambrose's face in his hands. "What am I supposed to do with you?" he asked, sadly.

"Anything," Ambrose offered dimly, and Cain's insides seized to hear it.

"Don't say that."

So he said, "I love you," instead, and Cain lay his forehead to Ambrose's.

"You make me feel weak," he muttered, and kissed Ambrose's face feverishly. "What the hell am I going to do with you?"

***

Cain cooked, that night, despite Ambrose's best efforts at detaining him (these consisted mostly of watching him, refusing to respond to questions, and remaining naked and sullen, sprawled on the rag rug). When Cain turned off the burners, the rice was still wet, and the beans were tough, but he'd washed a bowl of raspberries in the rain, and that was certainly something.

Dealing with Ambrose was like dealing with a sick animal. And Cain was sure he was sick; his eyes were dim, he wouldn't look at food, he had to be coaxed into everything. Even if his body was clear and healthy, Cain knew those signs. So he reflexively covered Ambrose in blankets, and checked his skin for fever, and his breathing for rhythm. He mumbled tenderly, nothing that made sense, but which sounded soothing. He only finally got Ambrose to eat at all by stroking his hair and feeding him from his own plate, a bite at a time, because Ambrose's sick heart could not encompass refusing Cain, even as it was content to starve.

He slept on the end of the bed, that night, because Cain wouldn't let him stay on the floor, but couldn't promise not to hold him, if they slept beside one another. And Ambrose couldn't promise not to run, if he woke up in the dark with an arm across his body, and wouldn't take the bed altogether.

By midnight, Cain's heart felt as sick as Ambrose's.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes revelations, dreams, provocation, desperation, panic, and an unfortunate reference to a farm dog. Warnings: Self-destructive behavior, friction, fire.

Ambrose was having a dream. 

It was a dream he'd been seeing a lot of, lately. He was back in his dark cell--Azkadellia must have been mad at him, if he wasn't in her chambers--and he couldn't move. He was back in all the chains, and they were tangled up in the sleeping bench, and it was too hot, he was stifling. Sometimes, in this dream, it was because the longcoats had snuck in on him and caught him before he could wake up and defend himself, and there was just this hard, heavy body holding him, an arm about to close up around his throat, and then he knew things were going to get much, much worse very quickly, because with longcoats they always did.

So he would twist himself gracefully out of the grip of the guard (it had always taken more of them to hold him) or untangle the chains, and he would flee through the door they'd left open, into the dark corridor, and then out into the old fortress, where it was dank and black and cold.

And he ran, and ran, and ran.

And then like a beacon, he would always see his doom before him, his salvation, the terrible princess on her terrible tall throne of twisting limbs. And he would go to her, helpless to stay away, and fall at her feet for forgiveness, or to beg her to come closer to him. And sometimes she would, and sometimes she would go, and sometimes there was only a sad and silent body on the ground, instead, and he would find a little peace in sitting down beside it and waiting for the dream to end.

 

***

 

Cain woke up angry.

He couldn't place why, at first, but it came to him soon enough, and he cursed out loud, because there was no one there to hear him vent his frustration, after all. He even punched the pillow with unnecessary force. 

He clenched his jaw and stared at the wall, for a little while, while he tried to collect himself for the inevitable trudge out to the Damn Tree. He was just deciding how to lock Ambrose in without completely crossing a line when he smelled smoke.

Anger forgotten, he vaulted up out of bed, and out to the main room, where he found guilt and alarm in equal measure. Ambrose wasn't at the tree, after all, because he was just outside the door with his back to Cain, and he was awake, and dressed, and there were no leaves in his hair or scratches that Cain could see (though the man was quite well covered). Cain almost wanted to apologize for misjudging him. But Ambrose had made a pile of paper and notebooks and pencils, and he had made a fire, and he was feeding the one with the other.

Cain crept nearer, to get a better look at this. He could just make out the shadow below the eye nearest him, through the bramble of curls, and a hasty timeline burning away on the responsibly rock-ringed fire, with words like "rafters," "starvation," and "balcony" curling into orange ash.

And then Cain noticed that the glitch hand was lashed up against its owner with cord, clutched into a fist, and now and then it jerked violently enough to upset Ambrose's balance, and he'd have to stop himself falling into the fire.

"...Ambrose," Cain said slowly, thinking this was an untenable position, "what are you doing?"

Ambrose turned a red-rimmed, tired glare on Cain and didn't stoop to stating the obvious. Very deliberately, instead, he lifted a scrap of paper, and read aloud, as conversationally as could be expected with that kind of edge on his voice: "'Begged Azkadellia to let me couple with her--she is wearing a red dress with the corset I hate the most because it has buckles--am pushed down stairs instead. Perhaps occurred during week four, or on two separate occasions.'" He dropped it on the fire, and lifted another. "Oh, this one's a question," he said with false cheer, "it says: 'What did that third longcoat (see "People and Places") do to me in that corridor (same day as choking incident, see timeline)?'" 

He looked at Cain significantly as he let this one fall and curl in the flame. 

"A map of Azkadellia's bedroom, a sketch of the cell, guesses on where they dumped me off of the truck when they let me go... There's the time I tried to kill a bird with a rock, because I was starving--that was later, by the way... Oh, and the time I ate farm dog... We must be in the food section of the pile. Begging for, being denied, eating from the floor, what Azkadellia's nail lacquer tasted like..." All of these he dropped on the fire, and nearly doused it in so doing. His voice tight and more than a little sarcastic, then, he asked, "Have you got the idea of what I'm doing, yet? Or should I read you more about f-fucking Azkadellia and all the grand times you can have with bored lawmen when you're a criminal vagrant wandering alone?"

Cain clenched his jaw and his fists.

And Ambrose flinched so hard he almost lost his balance.

Cain felt like he'd just dropped twenty feet and left his insides behind, at that. He had to swallow back bile, and immediately let go of a fist to cover his mouth. 

"Damnit, Ambrose," he managed to bite out, once the nausea had mostly passed, "I'm not going to hit you..."

The diffuse anger on Ambrose's face dimmed in favor of shame, and he relaxed his stance a little. "I know," he mumbled, and rubbed his face with his free hand. It was shaking. "I know, I think. I'm just..." He waved frustratedly at the paper, as if it would explain it all.

Cain kind of thought it did. 

So he sighed and came up to crouch down beside Ambrose. The pile of scraps was still so thick, so full of pieces; how much had he burned, already? Could it all be like that? Could there be so much of it, and that much more still uncertain in his head? Cain shook his head, slowly, and when he tried to look at Ambrose again he found him blurred, and had to blink a few times to clear his eyes.

"How long do you think you were there?" he asked, feeling like there was a hand tight on his throat.

"Six, seven weeks."

Cain cursed, startled.

"Yeah," Ambrose muttered. "We might be able to find a more exact count somewhere, if you like, I don't know what kind of records they were keeping."

"Ambrose..." Cain warned.

"Sorry," he replied quickly, and tossed another sheaf to its doom.

Cain shook his head. "It's all right." He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with the heels of his palms, and then they both watched the fire.

There was a tense, uncomfortable silence. 

"So, uh. What happened to your hand?" Cain asked, to cover it.

"It tried to pull things back out of the fire," Ambrose replied, darkly. "It was a matter of safety."

"Ah."

Ambrose bucked from the left elbow, and stuffed all but the last few scraps onto the fire in what looked suspiciously like retaliation.

"I feel like I should leave you two alone," Cain said, weakly. "Hate to come in the middle of a spat."

Ambrose snorted, unsmiling, and used a pencil to poke errant curls of paper back into the flames, before dropping it on as well. It sparked. "Now that's not very civic minded of you. Aren't you supposed to try to stop domestic violence? You know, restrain one or more of the offenders?"

Cain swallowed. There was something strange in Ambrose's tone, there. "You, uh, seem to have already done that."

"I think that makes me the aggressor, then," Ambrose demurred very calmly. "Maybe it should be saved from me."

Cain closed his eyes and tried to process that statement as something other than a request to be--restrained.

He failed. "Did you just ask me to tie you up?"

"I might have," Ambrose mumbled, his eyes reflecting fiery satisfaction as the paper achieved a new plane of existence.

Cain cleared his throat and searched for distraction. "Well, I'll tell you what, I find you out at that tree again and I'm looking for some rope. Getting too cold to go all the hell of the way out there, that early."

Ambrose gestured towards the side of the cottage, where there lay a spool of cord. "We've got some, you won't have to look far." It was the rope he'd used on his arm. "I'll leave it out for you."

"Ah." Cain reached a hand down to the ground to steady himself. His knees were starting to hurt, crouching like this, and he shifted. Gods, he still felt so tired. "You know, you're, uh, sure in a different mood, this morning."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah, you seem--" Cain caught it, then. "You're being sarcastic, again."

"Well done."

"Ambrose--"

"Putting those critical thinking skills to good use," he added.

"Look, kid, if you're fixing for a fight, you should just say so," Cain said, stiffly, trying to hang onto the end of his proverbial rope.

"I could take you with one arm tied behind my back," Ambrose spat.

"Well, it's tied in front, but I suppose that's no difference, is it?"

"We could find out," Ambrose said, and promptly turned sideways to knock a surprised Cain into the dirt, landing hard on top of him. Cain, out of reflex, shifted his weight to roll himself on top, and had his arm cocked back for a blow before he even remembered who was under him. 

And in that moment that he hung there, hesitating, he saw satisfaction in Ambrose's big, sad eyes. But before Cain's heart could even remember to beat again, Ambrose latched his legs and arm around him, and flattened him close. 

It was a moment before Cain realized that there were teeth and a tongue on his mouth, and another before he returned fire in kind. Ambrose tried to pull his hair, but it was too short to get a good hold on, so Cain tightened his fingers on Ambrose's, instead. Ambrose sighed into his mouth, and ground his hips up into Cain's.

"Wait," Cain broke away to say, "wait a minute, I'm not--"

"No," Ambrose begged, and pulled him down hard enough that Cain's lip was cut between their teeth, on impact.

Cain couldn't argue with that, and closed his eyes tight.

***

Their clothes were still on, but only by technicality, when Cain finally gathered enough will together to make another attempt at disentangling himself.

"No--no," he insisted, pinning Ambrose's free arm to the earth, as it tried to drag him back in. "You're not yourself."

"Who are you to know?" Ambrose spat desperately.

"Boy, don't push me right now," Cain panted.

"Or else what? What could I push you into doing that I don't want you to do?"

Cain didn't have an answer to that. "Look, I've only got just--just so much willpower right now..."

"Good," Ambrose keened, "please let go of it." He tried to pull Cain in, again, this time with his legs.

"I don't--damnit--look, I don't want to hurt you..."

"Of course you do," Ambrose pleaded, and Cain's stomach turned. He felt doused with cold water. 

He took a deep breath, gathered himself, and pushed firmly up and off. "No," he said, soberly, "I don't, Ambrose."

"Why not?" Ambrose asked, sitting up, his composure (such as it was) coming apart very quickly.

"'Cause I--I just... You know why, don't you?" Cain asked, a little desperate, getting his soot and grass-stained nightclothes arranged. "Think about it."

Ambrose looked on the verge of another incendiary remark, but his nerve failed him, and he started getting his own clothing hastily back in order, instead. About halfway through that process, his anger failed him, too, and as it ebbed away, the fear that had lurked beneath it--that always lurked, down in the pit of his stomach--swelled to fill the space it had left. 

There was a bitterness in his mouth, and shame.

He swallowed at them, and forced a button back into place one-handed as he let his eyes just barely skate over his surroundings; over the dying fire, over the scraps, over the grey horizon, over Cain's dirty knees, over his own.

"What am I doing?" he murmured, sick, as the vague, pervasive horror rose, and he shook his head. "Gods, Cain, I'm so, so..." 

And just as soon as that, it was too big.

There was too much of it to say or to stand, and he looked up, helpless. It grew like an unbreakable bubble in his chest until it had cut off his throat, he couldn't breathe around it, he couldn't swallow it. And then it grew until he couldn't see or hear or think through it, either, and there was nothing left.

***

Ambrose had another dream. A new dream.

He was running, like usual, fleeing through the fortress, but this time it was overlit with torches, and he couldn't find his way in the light. The twists and corners he knew so well blind were strange and garish, wrought in blotches of color.

He wept for it, then, because he knew he was caught--he couldn't escape, this way. "I couldn't find my way in the light," he moaned (though he only knew he said it, because there never was sound in his dreams), as the guard dragged him away, and chained him back up, and held him down as he fought, like a madman's straightjacket. Eventually, Ambrose's strength gave, and he lay, exhausted, spent.

He knew he wept for hours, then (though the part of his brain that remembered sleep science suggested that dreams were generally very short, so it was probably just a set of moments set very far apart). He wept under the watch of the guard until there was nothing in him, until his eyes failed, and his wailing voice, and his pounding heart, and everything else, and then the dream ended and he slept.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a new coping mechanism, an old one wrought new, sweetness, love, and the vengeful god of grout. Warnings: Pretty fluffy.

When Ambrose woke up, it was too dark to see. Or maybe he just hadn't managed to open his eyes.

He felt empty.

The bubble had shrunk down to something the size of a fist, and receded to the spot under his stomach where it usually lay, and it felt like it had left nothing behind in his chest at all. When he breathed out, he didn't breathe in again.

He wondered if he squeezed his eyes shut tightly enough, he could will stars.

He wondered if he squeezed himself tightly enough, there could be nothing.

But then there was a hand on his shoulder, in the dark, and his phantom lungs went back to their work, in spite of him. There was a murmur. "You awake?"

 _Cain,_ his brain supplied, and he tried to make his eyes close even tighter.

Then there was a sigh, and a much smaller sound as the hand withdrew: "All right. 'Love you, kid, sweet dreams."

 

***

 

Love?

Ambrose breathed the word in and swallowed it, and it echoed around the black space in his chest until it found meaning. His eyes opened wide, then, without his permission. _Love?_

It turned out it wasn't really as dark as all that, after all. It was more sort of... dark red, and mangy, and moth-eaten. Sofa-o'-clock, he thought dimly, and then his mouth twitched in a reflexive smile.

He put together from there that he was lying on the sofa, facing the back of it, wrapped up in their thickest blanket. The room was very dim, though not completely dark, but it must have been very late in the day. He drew a long breath through his nose, the noisy kind one takes on waking suddenly. 

"Hm? What'sat?" he mumbled, excessively sleepily, trying to coax the thing out again. _Love,_ he prayed to it.

"You're awake," Cain said, instead, sounding a little surprised.

"Just," Ambrose sighed, and closed his eyes again, rolling onto his back. _Love,_ he promised himself, anyway. He felt a little lighter. "What time is it?"

"Past five. You, uh, you been out for a while."

Fuzzy memories of the morning came to him, then, and he untangled his arms from the blanket (Cain must have freed the glitch hand from captivity) to rub his face. "Oh, gods, I must have been. It was hardly seven in the morning when I blacked out, I think, wasn't it?"

Cain was silent.

"Wasn't it? Cain?"

Cain's voice was hollow. "Must have been, yeah. You--" he began, but he gave up. "...Seven? Really?"

Ambrose was finding this turn of conversation alarming. So he took a deep breath and dragged the blanketed mass of his legs down to the floor, so he could sit up straight in his blanket cocoon. He felt a little more prepared for it, that way. "It's just a guess. Was it later than that?"

"'Guess I don't rightly know," Cain evaded. "Seemed later than that, to me, when you... fell asleep."

"How late?"

"Just about four hours ago," Cain confessed.

Ambrose considered that carefully, tamped down on the accompanying nausea, and very calmly said, "Then I believe we have differing perceptions on just when it was, in the process, that I stopped being involved."

"Ah."

"So I suppose I kept going, past the, um. Past the point I remember. Which was where you got up and said something manly and responsible about willpower and I realized what I was doing," Ambrose supplied, wishing his throat didn't feel like it was full of hot ants. "Would that be fair to say?"

"That's as far as you've got?"

"Yes," Ambrose said slowly. 

He was glad when Cain didn't dispute that further, and just nodded. "Then, yeah. That makes some sense."

"Some?"

"Well, you didn't seem with it, you just seemed awake."

"I don't think I was either," Ambrose sighed. He felt too hot all over, suddenly, and disentangled himself from the blanket, though the force of the motion made him feel a little seasick. "I didn't... do anything else really horrible or embarrassing or...?"

"No," Cain said, immediately. "You just... didn't seem to know where you were," he finished, lamely.

Ambrose nodded, and got up to go wash his face with very, very cold water, _love,_ for the moment, forgotten.

He frowned, when he saw himself in the mirror, there, and leaned close to look. His face was marked, and he rubbed at it until some of the dried salt had flaked off on his fingers. The collar of his shirt was stained, too.

So he stopped looking, bowed his face to the bowl, and washed his face so long that he hoped it might rinse completely away.

***

Ambrose sat down on the lid of the toilet and thought very hard, leaving his face buried in the towel and letting his breath make a warm place for it there. The fingers of his left hand drummed over his eye through the fabric.

What had happened? 

He had been wrapped up, clearly, because he woke that way. He had been crying--he could still taste it on his lips even as he'd tried to scrub it away. He'd been--well, up and moving, anyway--for a lot longer than he recalled, if Cain was to be believed (which he implicitly was). But that was all he had to work with. It all felt familiar, like a half-remembered dream--he did half-remember a dream, but it was the same kind of dream as always, with guards and evil places and terror, and waking up somewhere that he hadn't fallen asleep--but it didn't feel real. It felt like there was a little black void in his life, that he'd have much rather thought was full of a deep and empty sleep.

He hated it, this looking back and seeing shadows. It felt like glitching, 

He _hated_ it.

He hadn't cared as much about glitching, before he got his brain back--he hadn't always remembered that he didn't remember, so it was harder to worry about it so much. But now that the days went in straight lines from morning to night, he _noticed_ when there was any minute he couldn't account for, and it felt like slipping, like that horrible moment just before sleep when you think you're taking a step and find nothing beneath your feet, and the fall wakes you again.

He hated that, too.

He let himself sit there, and feel sick, and wonder, for a long, silent time. And then he finally steeled himself, got up, and went back out to the other room, still clutching the faded red towel up under his chin.

"Cain, could you... would you help me with something?"

 

***

 

They pieced together every half-formed image of the day that was in Ambrose's head with every blunt recollection of Cain's, and they took an hour to do it. They had to stop several times, for Ambrose to sit back and breathe, or get a glass of water, or count all the boards in the floor, but they trudged through, until Ambrose could put it back together almost as if he'd seen it himself, like a book with side-by-side translations.

It had gone something like this: He had realized what the hell he'd been trying to do--to get Cain to do--and realized all of the things he'd said, and he hadn't been able to deal with it. That was where he lost hold of things, and then he had tried to run, but Cain--not a longcoat, at all, he was wearing pajamas--caught him quickly, because he was confused and off balance and a little tangled in his clothes. He'd struggled, and hit Cain (for which he apologized profusely, when he saw the bruise later), and Cain had shepharded him back in and wrapped him up in the blanket, and his own arms, to kept Ambrose from swinging about too much, while he was in something that sounded distressingly like hysterics. When he'd stopped fighting, Cain had dared to untie his arm, and to lay him down, and then just sat beside him for the next four hours while he spent himself and his panic down far enough with weeping that he could pass out.

It was not a pretty thing to have. But it was, Ambrose supposed, better than nothing. It was better than guards, and it was better than failed escapes, and it was better than being trapped and hopeless in a cell, so he balled it up into a hard piece the size of a marble and swallowed it down. Even with the embarrassment and helplessness, he decided, he could take a good clean collapse over the rest any day.

And with that, he realized he felt a little bit better.

 

******************

 

Ambrose couldn't seem to stop crying.

Cain was trying to accept this. 

It wasn't really a problem--it didn't seem to upset Ambrose, too much, ironically--but it did take some getting used to the idea that there was nothing to be done for it. Since his Spell on the Sofa, Ambrose had just been raw, his threshold to emotion virtually nonexistent. "I have no filter left," he said (through tears, of course), but at least he was wearing a sort of watery smile at the time.

Something in him had apparently decided that this was the best safety valve it had, and it had never quite closed off, since, so much as slowed. Sometimes it did abate to the point where the clever use of a handkerchief could obscure the fact of it, like listening between drips to the leaking of the roof, but it never held back for so long that he could hide that he'd _been_ crying. His eyes were always a little red and sore, even at the best of times.

Ambrose had been embarrassed, and had apologized at first, but Cain had suggested that that was okay, and that he wouldn't tell anyone. And that maybe it _was_ good for him, at that. And then Ambrose had started crying in earnest again, so Cain had patted him awkwardly, but held him steadily, and Ambrose thought he could handle that, and that maybe it was helping after all.

 

***

 

Ambrose couldn't seem to stop remembering. 

It kept him trembling, unsteady. If he'd thought in some desperate moment that burning the pieces of his life that he'd made solid and concrete could stem the tide, he'd been very wrong; every new memory that formed was no less plagued with shame or terror than the rest, and they came on unbidden, in their own good time. It all had a momentum of its own, and all Ambrose could do for it was to batten down and weather it as it twisted through.

He tried to accept this. 

And after a while, he gracefully accepted the lost scraps of paper Cain had kept for him, too. And when he dug up a new notebook and began scratching in it, it was with a great deal of dignity and a conspicuous lack of comment from either of them. And, of course, loud sniffling.

He kept going about his days as normally as he could, after that, though he had no context for it, and "normal" did seem to include intermittent weeping, the occasional flight into the woods, and now and then trying to ride Cain's last nerve until it broke. But whenever he felt he needed to, he stopped what he was doing to pull out the notebook, and then he would put it back away whenever he was done, and Cain would make no comment on his sneezing and sobbing, and this seemed like a normal enough way to behave, to them. After a while it became so reflexive and (relatively) comfortable that if Ambrose was replacing a wheel on a full barrow, he could wordlessly leave Cain bracing the thing up on his own, and then be back, wiping his eyes, in time to save its contents and Cain's arms before either gave out. He left needles mid-stitch, but, "That way," he said, "I have to come back."

It seemed to be working that way, so Cain didn't question it. He was building up a kind of endurance for The Lurch, even as Ambrose became more efficient and considerate about how long he left Cain in it.

There was a kind of peace.

 

***

 

In a few weeks, the rain stopped, and the days turned clear and cold, so Cain and Ambrose borrowed a ladder to fix the leaks in their roof. Ambrose mostly braced the ladder against the wind, and passed tools up from the ground.

Once he stranded Cain up on the low roof to run inside, but when he came back, a little shamefaced, Cain was just lying across the overhang on his stomach, smiling, looking quite as casual as possible.

"So," Cain said, patiently.

"...Yes?" Ambrose asked, bracing.

Cain pointed to the hammer in the grass. And the ladder that had slipped over beside it, as well.

"Oh."

Cain grinned, when Ambrose handed up the hammer, and then went back to work. He even hummed a little. 

Ambrose gathered up the latter and braced it against the roof again. "Did it--did it get very windy, then, while I was in?"

Cain nodded. "Just glad I wasn't standing up, myself, when that gust came through..."

"Me, too," Ambrose chimed, shaken by the thought. His eyes were watering, again, just as soon as that. "I'm so sorry, Cain, I--"

"Hey, hey, hush. S'all right."

Ambrose smiled weakly, and then the tickle of tears caught up with him anyway, and he sneezed violently.

Cain shifted to roll off of his pocket and free his handkerchief, barely thinking about it. He shook it out of its fold and dropped it wordlessly down from the roof.

Ambrose watched it float until it had almost fallen too far to catch, but remembered himself and saved it from the mud. "Thank you," he mumbled, ashamed, as he blew his nose. "You're such a gentleman, Cain. Coming to the aid of those in distress. Like a boy sc--"

"Now none of that," Cain warned. "I can only barely abide 'gentleman,' as it is."

Ambrose sniffed, and carefully folded up the handkerchief, tucking it away in his own pocket (Cain lost more of them, that way...). "Well, you are. You're a man, aren't you, and you're very gentle."

Cain grunted, but his best efforts at a stiff, serious look were failing. He could see Ambrose grinning, out of the corner of his eye, and he couldn't seem to help smiling, himself, when he saw it. "I'll have you know I'm very tough."

"Of course you are," Ambrose placated. "Tin Men usually are."

"That's right."

"And so are boy scouts."

"Now you listen here..." Cain began, but when he looked down at his heckler, Ambrose was looking up at him with so much sweetness, and so much--devotion? Could that be it?--that it stopped his throat. He pushed on, trying "You... just..." but the wet grin proved too much. 

So Cain just shook his head, and smiled. "Whatever you say, sunshine."

 

***

 

It went on, like that. Peaceful, if damp.

But then one day, Ambrose found himself with the notebook open, and a dry face, even after he'd filled a half a page, so for the first time in a very long time, he let his pencil continue on, to contemplate distant things, like the rigging of bridges, and irrigation systems. It only lasted a moment, because his left hand rather promptly began pulling pencils from a cup on the desk and bouncing them on the floor, but his spirits were lifted too high to begrudge it. So he gave in, closed the book, and indulged the glitching whim, instead, which was apparently to scrub the kitchen tiles.

It went about it haphazardly, but with great enthusiasm.

"It's like a tornado," Ambrose said to Cain, fascinated. "Look, watch--are you watching? There it is, going along, wreaking devastation and horror in a perfectly normal way, holding pattern, holding direction, and then, boom! Right around a tile, off in a new direction. And then this row over here, that thought it was going to be spared, will lose one lone tile in an act of senseless cleaning. This hand is the cruel and chaotic god of dirty grout, smiting vengefully and at random."

"I love you," Cain said.

"There's a heady feeling of power, that goes with it," Ambrose went on, "I must be experiencing it on some level, because I feel very--" And then Ambrose caught up with his body, and decided the shaking of his hands and the flush of his face and the stupid grin he was wearing weren't in response to the joys of housekeeping, after all. It didn't stop him from talking, but neither of them listened past that point, or held it against him. Mostly, they smiled, and Ambrose cried as casually as possible as he rambled, because Ambrose had been crying for a month, at that point, and it was only to be expected. Cain offered him a handkerchief that was wrinkled but clean.

 _There it is,_ Ambrose thought, as Cain came and sat down beside him on the floor. _Love._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fluff won't last, unfortunately, but don't we all need a little sweetness?
> 
> Here's a little piece of art I did for moment of Ambrose waking up on the sofa:  
> https://www.deviantart.com/blindswandive/art/Love-75066934


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of the next arc in this series! Ambrose has to adjust to remembering the things he'd rather have left forgotten (and a few new glitches); Cain has to adjust to life with Ambrose; Azkadellia needs to adjust to life in general; and everyone needs purpose. This chapter includes uninvited guests, lies of omission, tenuous peace, sexual tension, repetition as a literary device, and a broken teacup.   
>  Warnings: Angst (as per usual), a (quasi-)mystery het pairing in the background, and The Tree.

Wyatt Cain was in love.

It was all he could think about. It was like Spring come early, like being a stupid, jittery kid, again, chasing around after some sweeter, smaller thing. It filled his head, it filled his chest, his belly. He felt too full with it to eat, so he civilly let Ambrose pick their food (it wasn't really eating, if there wasn't meat involved, after all), and he lived so long on blackberries that his tongue was blue for three days running.

He felt like a foal, and that was only a bit from the woodsy diet. His heart beat too fast, he fidgeted too much, his knees got weak--he felt desperate, all the time, though he was only half willing to put a name to that feeling, old and familiar though it was.

He was buzzing.

He was light.

One of these days, Cain decided--as soon as the chill was off the air--he was going to have to run Ambrose out into the woods, or into the river, and make some kind of mess with him. He wasn't sure of quite how, yet, or really of whether he was even ready to find out, just that it would be worth a try.

Gods, he longed for Spring.

 

***

 

Ambrose's belly was full of marbles.

He was fairly sure that this was a good thing. Every day he swallowed something new and terrible, or something old and terrible, and it felt like a heavy stone going down, so he saw it as one. And it hurt, but it sank, and gave a little weight to him. As they piled up inside of him, one after another, they made him feel solid, and real, and kept him just heavy enough that he couldn't float away to some terrible place of shades and nothingness. 

It kept the fear down.

Down at the pit of his stomach, below all the imaginary marbles, there was always the small, wet bubble of fear, a little lump of terror and anxiety, and every day Ambrose looked at it in his mind, swelling and sinking like a breathing bubble in a swamp, like the throat of a bullfrog. And every solid thing he knew he laid on top of it, to bury it deeper and deeper with the feelings he hoped were stronger, and denser, like sickness and pain and love. Every time he swallowed his tears, he turned them to glass, and let them fall and weigh on the swell.

He thought it _was_ growing smaller, week by week, as if when it breathed out, the fear just couldn't breathe back in quite as deeply, under all that strain. He hoped it was dying, like the sick, twisting tree out in the frozen woods was. 

Ambrose closed his eyes sometimes and pictured the million year cycle of the swamp inside of him, where the bones of his demons would crumble into earth, when it would all just finally press into black peat under the weight of the dark, and there would be nothing left of any of it. And then some sunshine, eternally far away, might dawn on it, and new grasses would grow, and flowers, and berries, on top of the rotted, forgotten mass of the rest.

It was a strange kind of peace. But he found himself looking for the Spring.

 

********

 

Spring was late.

"My God, you guys are as bad as Azkadellia," DG scolded them over the cup of raspberry tea that she had helped herself to, after she'd let herself in from the new wave of drizzling rain.

Ambrose broke the handle off of a cup.

"How's that?" Cain asked, to cover it, as Ambrose went and fished studiously into a desk drawer for glue.

DG didn't mention it. "Well, it's like you're _right here,_ and everything seemed totally fine, and now you're all too busy hiding away in your little lairs to even come out and say 'hi' to me, anymore." She settled sulkily into her chair (which did not rock in the slightest). "I mean, it's nice catching up with my parents and all, but it feels a little creepy to be spending so much time with your formerly-absentee dad, you know? And talking to the back of a closed door..." Her voice trailed and her eyes drifted, but she corralled them quickly enough. "Anyway, I've missed you guys a lot."

"How is your father?" Ambrose asked, dimly, as if Azkadellia had not been mentioned at all. "Is he settling back into palace life?"

"Uh, sure," DG said, brow knit, "I guess. Since you wouldn't know. Since you never come _visit_ me, which was the point I was trying to make. You haven't even answered most of my notes! I must have sent like a million messengers over here."

She had.

The Queen had promised Ambrose and Cain that they would want for nothing, after their service to the kingdom. If it was really their whim to hide out in an abandoned cottage on the edge of the grounds until they died, she suggested, with no company but one another, then so be it--they would be accommodated in any way they wished. But about the time the younger princess had become terminally bored with lying about the palace, as winter dragged on into the dreariest Spring imaginable, the envoys had begun. Did Cain want to go back into the police force? they asked. Did he want to help with war crimes trials? And Glitch, they said, had to see the surgeons--was long past due to see them, in fact--and decide about whether it was time to sew up his skull once and for all, or whether more work needed to be done inside to make him whole. And, while they were at it, weren't they both overdue for a visit to the princess, as well?

And Cain and Ambrose had done everything they could to pretend they were just too busy, but that they were thinking about these things, and that they discussed them all the time, when they never really mentioned them at all.

"Sorry, kid," Cain evaded, now, "it's been... kinda' hectic out here, getting this place back up and running." 

Up and running and then some, he admitted to himself, a little guiltily. To avoid cabin fever (cottage fever?) and keep busy, the little place had been driven so far through perfection it had come out the other side. They'd made themselves sick on the fumes from bleach and varnish more than once, as they tried to keep moving forward, and it was now so clean and new that they'd begun to purposefully mar, muck, and mis-arrange things, again, to take some of the unnatural sheen off.

DG seemed to have noticed this, and mugged. "I thought you said it wasn't going to be bad, when you moved in here," she accused, laconically. "You know, back at the end of summer. Like a half a year ago. You said you didn't need any help." 

"Well, there was nothing we couldn't handle, just more than met the eye," Cain tried. "We had to rewire, fix plumbing, patch the roof..."

"Exorcise demons," Ambrose added, a little numbly, as he fumbled the jar of glue he was trying to set down on the table. (It clunked loudly, but didn't crack.) He excused himself to the bathroom, then, looking a little surprised at himself.

"And dust," Cain went on, loyally trying to draw fire while Ambrose beat his escape, "years and years of dust."

There was a beat of silence, while they both waited for the door to close, behind the refugee. 

And then DG pounced. "All right," she said, suddenly stern and quiet, "what's going on? And don't tell me 'nothing' because he--" she pointed after Ambrose, then, "is about to bolt. So is my sister, by the way." She gathered the broken cup and the glue together in front of her quite automatically, and started making the repairs her friend had abandoned, while she waited for Cain to start.

Cain looked around for a way to evade, but when the water started running hard in the bathroom--hard enough to muffle sound--he took it as enough permission to speak.

"Things have just... been kind of hard," he admitted, low. "The whole working synapse thing has been a mess of trouble, he went through some hard times he doesn't really want back."

"Because of Azkadellia, you mean," DG supplied confidently, but not unsympathetically, as she clamped the damaged cup together with her fingers.

Cain stared. "How'd...?"

"Well, jeez," DG hissed, eyes wide, "I mean she took his brain out. And pillaged the countryside, and killed a ton of people and everything. Including me, thank you!" She shook her head. " _Everyone_ went through a bad time because of her. And she's totally freaked out about it all, herself, you know. I mean, imagine the guilt..." There was a hint of a scolding, there, that Cain ignored almost entirely.

He nodded slowly, instead, considering how to proceed. "Yeah. She, uh, she did some pretty terrible things to people." 

He tried to give this weight, to to put the promise of Ambrose's personal kind of terror in it. Cain willed DG to understand just what he could be going through, the overwhelming degree of it... Wasn't she one of those sensitive, empathic types, anyway? Shouldn't she be able to read it?

She read something, at least. "Oh, Cain, I'm sorry..." she said, rising (after setting the cup down quite delicately), and circled the table to him. "You already know how bad it was, you went through so much, yourself..." And she wrapped her arms tightly around his neck.

"That's not..." Cain began, but sighed, giving her back a pat. So much for that.

She stayed there longer than he thought was strictly necessary. He began examining the ceiling for cracks.

"Can I get some of that?" Ambrose eventually asked, a weak smile in his voice. Cain hadn't heard him emerge, but breathed his relief.

"Aw, of course you can," DG said, and let the uncomfortable Cain collect himself while she went and squeezed Ambrose like a ragdoll. 

Ambrose held her very tightly, for a while, and snuggled his cheek against her hair in a strange blue spell of peace. In all the time hiding out from the outside world, he wondered if he'd missed DG and her hugs most of all--they were comfortable, and frank, and warm. He'd forgotten that, over the last half annual. He wondered what else he'd forgotten.

"You smell like the palace," he said, fondly, swaying a little, before he could realize he'd thought it.

"Oh, God, don't say that," DG said, and backed up enough to make a face at him. And just like that, the spell was broken, and the world got a little more normal, again. "It smells dusty and old in there."

"No, it doesn't," Ambrose chided, and reluctantly let her go, but his left hand still lingered at the shoulder of her damp dress as if it belonged there. "It smells like cedar, and dark purple."

"And cats!"

"Oh, it does not," he said, and pushed her playfully with his free hand. "Since when are there cats?"

"Well it does in my end of the palace, you should come to my room and see. Definitely _eau du cat_ in there," she insisted, with a buzz of what sounded, oddly, quite a lot like joy. "And it's damp. So, really, it smells like _damp_ cats."

"That isn't exactly a can't-turn-it-down kind of offer, you realize," Cain said, giving in to a smile.

DG tactfully dislodged the glitch hand then by turning around to face Cain, and roll her eyes at him. "You know I could just have you collected, right? I have power, now," she said, waving her fingers spookily. "They listen to me, over there, God knows why."

"Because you're a princess, Princess," Cain reminded her. "They have to."

"Well, fine, but that includes you." She stuck her tongue out at him, before turning back to Ambrose. "So, Glitch. Are you guys going to at least come to dinner, soon?"

"Ambrose," Cain corrected automatically.

"Right, Ambrose," DG said, waving dismissively.

"I... I suppose we should..." Ambrose said, but it sounded more placating than sure.

"Yes, you should," DG agreed, and pressed forward. "Hey, how about tomorrow, after you see the alchemist? My mother said to remind you," she added, "two-thirty sharp. Don't forget."

"What?" Cain asked, startled, and it was Ambrose's turn to cover.

"I won't forget," he said, quickly, with badly feigned confidence. "Two-thirty it is. And I'll--I'll meet you both for supper, afterwards."

"You, too, Cain," DG insisted, pointing a finger at him. "And no flaking, Glitch," she added, turning the finger on him.

"Yes, ma'am, no flaking," Ambrose promised, with a watery little smile, as the forefinger of his left hand beelined to touch tips with DG's, of its own accord. "So. See you then, then."

And so, blinking at what she was sure was Ambrose _dismissing her,_ DG nodded, gathered another, brisker, hug from each of them, and headed back off across the soggy grounds.

They were both quiet, and watched her go. Cain shifted the cup to brace it carefully against the teapot, just in case.

Then he folded his hands and looked up at Ambrose expectantly.

 

***

 

"I didn't--I just--I forgot," Ambrose blustered. "No, that's a lie, I don't know why I said that. I did mean to mention it, though. It just didn't occur to me that there was only tonight left between today and tomorrow."

"But... why were you waiting to tell me at all?" Cain asked, honestly confused. "It's just a doctor's appointment."

"I don't know," Ambrose evaded, twisting his fingers. "I hadn't thought about that. Maybe I... maybe I didn't want you to feel like you had to go in there, too? Just because I'm obeying her Majesty's suggestions doesn't--doesn't mean you should feel compelled to, to, oh, I don't know. Start going out and working or anything."

"I'd kind of like to," Cain said, in an attempt to be comforting. "You don't have to worry about that."

"I don't?" Ambrose asked, faintly.

Cain shrugged. "Nah."

"Oh. Well," Ambrose said, and nodded. 

And then he turned around, opened the door, and wandered out.

 

********

 

Cain regretted the head start he'd given Ambrose. His assumption that Ambrose had just gotten distracted, or wanted some air, was apparently a poor one, and when a few minutes didn't bring him back in and Cain stepped out to look for him, he wasn't in sight, any more.

So Cain sighed and made his best guess, starting off into the woods. Towards the tree. 

That ugly, damnable tree.

And as he was walking, crushing dead leaves and stumbling over the treacherous roots they covered, he decided he hated it. He cursed the tree a little harder with every step. And by the time he could see the twist of its branches, he was actively wishing for a late storm that would strike the thing down with lightning and burn it to the ground, until there was nothing left in its place but ash and the smell of fire.

 

************

 

Back in the palace, DG was knocking gingerly on Azkadellia's door. "Az?" she called, softly.

There was no response, but DG thought she heard a rustle, so she ploughed on doggedly.

"Well, um, Cain and Glitch are going to come over tomorrow, okay? You should come out and say hello, when they do. Would you do that? Come have dinner with Mom and Ahamo and us." She waited a moment. "Okay, sweetie? Az?"

She leaned her ear against the door, but all was still inside. 

So DG sighed, and leaned back into the pair of warm arms that were now encircling her waist. She hadn't heard him pad up. "She's not coming out," she murmured.

"No," was the soft, dusty reply.

"Maybe later?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she sighed, and let herself be guided away, back to her room, in a ponderous shuffle step. "But why does no one come out for me?"

"I do."

DG smiled, linking up elbows snugly. "Yeah, you do. My brave venture-out-er," she said, and nuzzled into the nearest shoulder. "What would I do without you?"

"Wait at the door...?"

"Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right."

 

************

 

Ambrose's belly was full of paper.

He didn't know how that had started. But whenever he wrote out new memories and traumas, these days, the glitch-hand was redacting them, tearing out names, words, whole paragraphs. And when they were removed, it balled them up and pressed the pieces to his mouth.

So he ate them. Why resist?

Sometimes, it only hid them away in his pocket for use later, in times of stress--like now. Now, tense and stamping, he was feverishly consuming his wicked little thoughts for kindling, to feed whatever it was he was angry about (not that he exactly knew what that was).

He wondered, if he poured enough fuel in after them, if he could light them.

He wondered if that would work any better than burning them outright had.

Probably not, he decided. And then he tripped over the tree, landed hard, and thought he should try it anyway. Fire would be good, right now.

 

********

 

A pipe, Cain thought dimly, as he trudged on. If he smoked, he could just drop it, accidentally, by the tree, some time. It would be easy, wouldn't it? Just a clumsy mistake, and then he could lose sight of it, and foolishly assume it was put out by the damp leaves. And hope it was actually catching dryer leaves on fire, below.

Maybe the horrible, diseased thing would finally die, then.

And then maybe Ambrose would just stay.

Ah, but, Cain's demons thought, maybe he'd just keep running, instead.

And Cain wondered if the day he finally couldn't find Ambrose at the tree could be worse than all the times he did.

 

*************

 

Azkadellia waited, holding her breath, for the sound of footsteps to fade down the hall, before she cracked the door to look after them. She just caught sight of DG's grass-stained tennis shoe disappearing around the corner.

She closed the door, then, and went back to her window, to peer through the haze of her gauzey curtains and catch her breath. She trailed her fingers over all the things on the sill--the velvet bag, the pouch of harbs, the slender silver pipe, the bowl of strange confections--as she watched the grounds for any movement. And when she saw none, and when her breathing was steady, she scooped everything into her bag, and crept back to the door and out, through the halls, like a breeze, and fled across the grounds to the woods, chased by dusk.

 

*************

 

"All right, let's try this again," Cain bit out, through his teeth, tossing his hat and coat aside onto the carpet of dead leaves around them. His jaw hurt from clenching, his head hurt from that, his knees hurt from stumbling, and less tangible things hurt, too. He felt tired, and his patience was worn down to the skin.

Ambrose was leaned up against the tree, of course, but he didn't look up. His eyes were fixed so hard on a patch of those leaves that Cain wondered if he would do the work of burning them away for him. He was wearing a look that seemed to contain both self-righteous irritation and self-aware shame at once, like a depressed spring, coiled and mashed and with an uncertain trajectory.

And when he did finally glance up, he was indignant. Cain looked like he was ready to start a bar fight, and that struck Ambrose as too offensive to be borne. "Well what did you have in mind?" he muttered, a little more sarcastically than he'd particularly meant to. "Settling it like men?"

"Settling what, is what I came to find out! So start talking," Cain demanded. "What the hell is going on?"

"Ha," Ambrose spat, and then really wasn't quite sure why. So with less bravado, he said, "Nothing. What do you mean?"

"You know damn well," Cain insisted, though he suddenly wasn't sure it was true, himself. Sometimes talking with Ambrose felt like spinning in circles until you were dizzy. But momentum had him, anyway.

It had Ambrose, too. Ambrose felt the kindling in his belly catching to burn a strange, smoldering fire, and it fed on the mess of black peat below. He half believed that if he breathed out, there would be a swirl of blue steam to show for it.

There wasn't. He deflated only slightly at this revelation.

"That's easy for you to say, isn't it? Things just tend to follow one to the next, don't they, Tin Man, in neat little lines?"

"Don't bait me, birdie."

"Or what?" Ambrose said, more than a little petulantly, but he seemed to be shrinking. Cain had stepped so, so close to him.

"There's no 'or,' Ambrose," he said, curling his fists in Ambrose's coat and pulling him upright. "There's no 'or else,' there's just _'don't.'_ " He took the deepest breath he could, then, to steady himself, and said, "Tell me why you're running."

"Because I don't want you to leave!" Ambrose snapped, even as he tried to push Cain away. "Let go."

"I'm not the one who leaves, Ambrose!" Cain didn't.

"But--but that's different," the flustered Ambrose insisted, as he struggled to be free of his coat. When he failed, he clutched at Cain's shirt, instead. "It's _different._ _I'm_ not gone all day, every day, getting shot and killed and leaving me alone. And I'm not going crazy because I'm sick of being around me and need to get away!"

Cain growled and pulled him a little closer, even as some part of him relaxed. If that's what this was about... "Listen to me, sweetheart," he said, tersely. "Yes, I'm going crazy in there. Yes, I need to get out, and I don't want to only get to leave the house when I'm chasing you out to this gods-damned tree." He punctuated that by pushing Ambrose flush up against it. "But I'm not trying to get away from you, I just want to--I want to go out to the town and, and get a drink or something. Jump in the river and swim. Anything."

"Without me?" Ambrose asked, righteously.

And Cain shook him once, pushing him harder up against the tree as he did. Ambrose closed his eyes as a little of the wind was knocked out of him in a sigh, and clung hard to the cloth in his fists. 

" _No,_ " Cain snarled, raw. "I want you _with_ me. I want--I want you." He gave him another shake, but a little uneasily, this time. His tongue felt thick, and his head felt like it was buzzing. "I want to chase you down, and I want to catch you," he said, low, pushing up closer against Ambrose. "I don't want you to get away."

Ambrose swallowed. The fire that had been making his stomach ache seemed to have turned him into one big fever. He felt sweat beading along his hairline, and his shirt sticking to his back. "Well, that puts you in a tough position, then, Tin Man," he said, faintly, "do you want me to run or not?"

Cain moved back a fraction and loosened his grip by sheer force of will, and very carefully said, "I want you to run home. Now. And if you don't, I'm going to knock you down right here and call you 'caught.'"

The battle played out briefly in Ambrose's eyes, and then they flicked off in the direction of the cottage...

He staggered upright, and bolted.

This time, Cain barely gave Ambrose a head start at all.

When he tripped over a root (one of the same ones he'd hit on the way in), and came down into a roll, he thought he saw a shimmer from back the way he came, like the glint of silver, or maybe satin, crawling up into the tree, but it was swallowed up in the long shadows of sunset before he could get a better look. And he didn't have much time to stop and think about it, anyway--his heart was beating too fast and his breath coming too short for him to let Ambrose get too far away. So he clambered back up onto shaky legs, and galloped off towards home.

 

********

 

"Cain..." Ambrose warned (or pleaded?), a hand extended to block Cain's approach. He was trembling, trying to catch his breath from their chase, but grinning and giddy, as he backed into the last corner he could find. The bathtub had seemed like such a good barrier, at the time, but it felt somehow insubstantial, now. "I'm--look, I'm very sorry. About--about running off," he said, "and being so hard on you..."

"And?" Cain said, dismissively, as he climbed purposefully into the tub and over it, to bring himself up against Ambrose's palm.

"And... and so you should be big about the whole thing, and accept my apology. Right?"

"Probably." But he pushed closer, anyway.

Ambrose gave, quaking, but delight was evident in his eyes. "Oh."

"So how'm I going to keep you from running off?" Cain asked, gripping Ambrose's waist so that it tickled him and he squirmed.

"I--I don't know! You, um, certainly can't leave for days at a time. Or--or get shot." Ambrose tried to climb the wall with his back.

"Done," Cain said firmly, and nodded.

"And if you're going to work," Ambrose added, "you'll have to start small. To let me get used to it."

"Fine."

"And, I--I don't know, a length of rope?"

Cain snorted and ducked in closer, then, to wrap his arms around Ambrose's waist and haul him up over a shoulder, howling and laughing his protest all the way back out to the living room rug.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a consummation, a probably-not-too-surprising revelation of relationship, too much smoking, suspicions, and an axe. Warnings: Sex (FINALLY), a very little bit of kink, and a lotta' angst.

Up in the twisted limbs of the tree--her throne, she fancied--Azkadellia was damping down leaves into the little silver bowl. As Cain, a mile away, began to forget about the glimmer, and hauled Ambrose up to carry him away like a plunderer, she struck a match on the bark and lit her pipe, bathing her view of the woods in a blue haze. She imagined she could hear them laughing, all the way from the cabin, but she couldn't, really, over the faint rustle of burning. So she leaned back to wait out midnight, maybe dawn, and blew her smoke up to the sky, until it blotted the light of the stars, too.

 

*******

 

Cain fell on Ambrose with the weight of seasons. 

The tension of the day still had him strung like a bow. And try though he might to focus, his brain was giving into momentum and desperation and anticipation. He felt half blind and half mad in his love.

For a second, as he pushed Ambrose's coat back and peeled his shirt up his arms, he had the wild thought that he was an animal stripping the hide from its prey, before feasting, rather than a man with his soon-to-be, first-time lover. But it passed quickly, and was soon forgotten.

Cain fumbled resistant buttons and tugged, but in the end abandoned Ambrose's clothes at the end of his arms, leaving disentangling his wrists to Ambrose's own discretion. It was much more important to shake his own shirt off and kick his boots free, suddenly, because he was falling behind (whatever that meant), and his skin was suffocating and he couldn't breathe, either.

Given half the excuse, Ambrose elected to leave the fabric tangles exactly where they were, even as his glitch hand stretched out through them towards a chair leg and gripped hold of it, anchoring him hard into place. Nobody mentioned this, which suited them both fine.

Cain was down to his pants and hat. And for a moment, there was a lull, heavy and powerful, as they both fell absolutely still, staring at one another. It seemed for half a terrible second that they would lose this, if they moved, if they breathed, that it would escape like a bolting animal. But then Cain took a deep breath, reached up, and extremely deliberately lifted his hat up and off of his head. Ambrose watched spellbound, as he let it spin idly away with a toss. 

At that moment, it was just as sure that they would lose this thing if they _didn't_ grasp for it immediately, pounce and catch and devour. It tipped the balance. For once, the wanton, wicked look that took Ambrose didn't fill Cain with fear--it filled him with something else, instead. It filled him so far that he couldn't quite contain it. And when Ambrose arched and chewed on one corner of his lower lip, looking up at him like he might just go up from all the kindling inside and take the whole place with him, Cain hissed like he was burned and dove in to catch fire.

They kissed, if you could call it that. Each fought to crawl deeper inside the other, to take more of the other between their teeth, to bite and delve and swallow. And their bodies moved blindly and strangely against one another, in the confused and desperate way branches rub in the wind, and hair tangles. 

Cain's hands must have found their way somewhere, at some point, because various zippers had come open at his insistence, but he wasn't sure how he'd done it or if it mattered. And he didn't care--it was done, and he could go back to digging his fingers into Ambrose's ribs, his hair, back to pulling one of his legs up and around him so that he could get _closer,_ hold him _tighter,_ press _harder_ up against him.

Ambrose clung to him like he was about to fall out of a tree and Cain was his last hold, even as he held himself intently helpless and off balance. He wasn't actually exactly sure where he was or what was going on, but he knew who he was with and savored the slow slickness between their bellies, the pressure and grinding and trembling, and that was enough to swell his chest with love and glee. He laughed against Cain's mouth even as his eyes started to prickle and burn. And when that made him need to sneeze, he managed to just miss Cain's face by twisting away (which Cain was reluctant to let him do at all), and then laughed harder as his tears let go, before craning up to stifle himself once more, gratefully, in Cain's kiss, sniffling and giddy.

They didn't stay there too long, couldn't, twisting against one another that way, because there was too much bearing against them to be fenced back well at all. But they grasped and clutched and pushed for every second they could bear before giving in; first Cain, and then Ambrose, startled, as his lover (his lover!) clung to him, and gasped and held his face and kissed him aimlessly. 

Ambrose choked on a sob and fought his way, wide eyed, out of his self-imposed restraint. When he was free enough, at least, he wrapped his arms around Cain's drifting head, cradling it down against his chest like something precious strange. He kissed the top of Cain's skull feverishly, nuzzling his scalp and chewing fondly at his hair, and didn't see the world at all, through the blurriness and bliss.

 

**********

 

Azkadellia's belly was full of smoke.

She wasn't really sure why she'd taken up smoking the foul thing in the first place--she couldn't seem to stop, now--but she liked the burning, and the blue dimness that filled her room when she'd been at it for an hour or two, or that feigned a fog around her, in the woods.

And the taste of ash. When she ever looked in the mirror, she knew that what she was seeing was a burned down house, and that she was sitting alone inside of it, now that the witch had left her. It seemed fitting that she should be able to taste the smoldering.

But it felt familiar, too, to have the smoke haze around her. It was right, to look through a dull ache, to be surrounded by darkness, like she had been for so many years--she could pretend she hadn't really been abandoned, at all, that way, that it was just very quiet. It felt familiar to have the locks between herself and her family, or a few miles. It felt familiar to just stay away and hate them as she'd done for as long as she could remember.

She hated them.

And she didn't, of course. The swell of warmth that she'd felt, that hypnotic regression into her childhood that had taken her away from the witch, still crept up on her sometimes, haunting and hollow. And when DG picked her lock and snuck into bed with her while she was busy trying to sleep through the afternoon, Azkadellia got a sense of strange, sick calm. She played dead, when it happened, but she thought she might love it a little, too.

She still changed the lock weekly, though.

She never left, anymore.

Week by week, Azkadellia had dropped her contact with the outside world, until it started to feel right. It fell away, piece by piece, like leaves in winter, until only the twisted, gnarled trunk was left, the raw, diseased starkness of her solitary company.

And the smoke.

She _had_ left to come to the tree, though. She had seen _him_ here. That had been all right. But that would be over, now, too, wouldn't it? Some terrible precognition told her there would be nothing left of it, soon. Maybe sooner than she could have ever expected.

So she spent the night in its branches, like a strange queen waiting to be deposed, and hated the dawn.

 

**********

 

"Ambrose?" Cain called, from the sofa, rubbing the grit of the night from his eyes. He smiled what was far too wide a smile, for just waking, but the night still had him filled up to overflowing with a sleepy joy and ease and calm.

"Ambrose?" he called, again, sitting up, but there was no reply. So he stumbled up to make the obligatory round of the place, and the perimeter.

'Need a bath,' he thought, idly, as he trudged. He felt stiff and grimy; he was still in his clothes from the day before. Well, the parts of them he'd still been wearing when they'd finally crawled back up onto the couch, together, and given in to sleep. They still smelled like the rotting leaves that carpeted the woods. But they smelled like earned sweat, too, so maybe that was all right.

Cain was certain he had just missed him, or a note. Hadn't they fixed something, yesterday? He wouldn't be gone, already. When he finished the circuit, though, he felt a heaviness building in his ribs, as the lingering pleasure began to fade, and he was finally forced to process Ambrose's absence. 

Again? 

'Maybe he just left early,' he thought, generously. 'And maybe I slept late.' So he went in to check the little clock by the bed, hoping it was midday, that the clouds were just covering bright suns.

But it was barely nine.

So he pulled back on his shirt, found his coat and hat where they'd been tossed under the table, the night before, and walked out into the chill.

The walk felt like it was taking forever, this morning. Distracted by the greyness of his thoughts, he lost the path a few times, but he always came back to it before losing too much ground. He barely saw the trees around him.

Until he ran into Azkadellia.

He'd almost passed the tree, and she'd been coming out from behind it, and their collision was a quiet one. He helped her with her dropped bag, and recovered her silver pipe from behind a root. She handed him his hat. She went back on her way.

Cain stayed.

Cain stayed and looked up at the branches. He stared for a long while, imagining he saw purple threads from the dress Azkadellia had been wearing and red threads from one of Ambrose's coats, up in a fork of the branches, but he couldn't reach it from the ground, so he tried to dismiss it as a trick of the eye. Dried sap, catching the long morning light, where it was cracking through the clouds. He looked at the ground, then, instead. He put on his hat.

And then he wandered home, more slowly still than before, cutting a random path that would keep him away from the usual route. He didn't want to see Azkadellia's back, in the distance, and the shimmer of her red satin and silver. And he didn't want to see anyone else ahead, either.

 

***

The door was open, when Cain got back. 

"Cain!" cheered Ambrose, over brightly, as he approached. Their eyes didn't quite meet, though they both pretended to look at one another.

Ambrose had clearly only just beaten him home. His boots were still on, and damp, and his coat (red, Cain noted grimly) was tossed carelessly over a chair. He was picking the twigs out of a basket of early dasaberries.

The kind that grew near the tree.

Cain's ribs ached. "There you are," he said, dimly.

"And there _you_ are! I wondered where you'd gone."

Cain shrugged. "Out looking for you, again." He tossed his hat onto the table. "I'm gonna' have a bath. What time is it?"

"A little after eleven, I think. I'm going to go out to the palace early, maybe in an hour or so, to say hello to her Majesty and take these to the kitchens so we can all have them after dinner, how does that sound?"

"Just fine. Remember to have something for lunch before you go, though," Cain said, stripping his coat off as he trudged towards the bathroom.

"Don't think you'll be out in time to have it with me?" Ambrose asked, looking slightly hurt.

"Probably not. 'Feel pretty grungy. I expect it'll take me some time to scrub it off."

"Well, all right," Ambrose said, shuffling, "but I'll see you this evening up at the palace?"

"Yeah," Cain said, as he reach to open the door, but it didn't move. Distantly, he registered that he'd stopped pushing it, and that he was saying, "You know, on second thought..." 

He caught up with himself barely in time to say, "I've still got some rough work to do, today, 'ought to do it before I get scrubbed up. No sense having to do it twice."

"Well, that makes sense. Here," Ambrose added, catching Cain as he passed on the way back to the door. "Have one, before you go," he said, as he pressed a berry close to Cain's mouth.

Cain ate it from Ambrose's fingers, and felt like a dog to do it. "Thanks," he mumbled, "see you this afternoon."

"Okay." Ambrose said, and reached to kiss his cheek, but almost missed, because Cain kept moving.

Outside, as he passed the wood pile on his way back into the woods, Cain collected his axe.

 

*************

 

DG tapped on Azkadellia's door for the third time, that afternoon. "Sweetie, Glitch is back from his appointment, and Cain should be here soon, too. They're doing some kind of cocktail thing that looks fun, out here, you want to come out and have one? Or want me to bring you something?"

Azkadellia, for her part, moved decidedly further from the door, and went to sit at the windowsill.

"Honey?" DG called, again. "Come on, there's, like, a purple one, and a blue one, and some pink thing with a flower in it... Which one do you want?" After a pause, she called a little more quietly, "Can you say something to at least let me know you're okay in there?"

And, when Azkadellia's eyes fixed on the place where little shoots of black, gnarled wood should be peaking through the rest, and weren't, she screamed. It was a kind of answer.

 

***

 

DG had broken the door open, but got nothing for her efforts.

"I just burned myself," Azkadellia lied, again, firmly, gesturing towards her (unlit) pipe. "I'm fine, but I'm tired. Go on without me, little sister, I won't be any fun."

"But, Az--"

"I said go, DG."

DG tried to protest further, but found herself locked outside of the door, again, without having had to walk to get there. Sometimes she thought she hated magic.

She tried the knob, again, feeling desperate and foolish, but it wouldn't budge, so she gave in, for the time being. But when she was found (she'd been missing a good while, herself), she was sitting on the top of the stairs, with her face on her arms, which were folded on her knees. She gave up the arms, readily, in favor of the offered shoulder. 

"I'm just so worried for her... Oh, god, I hate to get your mane wet," she said, a little thickly, even as she burrowed her face into it. It was warm, and the joy of it always seemed to melt everything else. She laughed a little, wiping her eyes again.

"Don't mind."

"My hero," she sighed, and felt just enough better.

 

***********

 

The tension from the morning drained away from Cain's body, in the bath. When he emerged, he was generally satisfied with life; he was tired from hard work, and he was clean, and and the wood pile was stocked with plenty of only slightly rotted wood. He wouldn't have to go out chopping or gathering wood at least until the next winter came, and that felt good. After he'd stuffed the belly of the iron stove with it, he'd even gone ahead and lit it, boiled a kettle with its heat. He'd forgotten to drink the tea, in the face of the irresistible draw of the bath, but he'd had a lot of satisfaction about its existence.

He didn't tell Ambrose.

He hoped Ambrose wouldn't find out any time soon.

Cain just kissed him hello, when he turned up (late) to the palace for dinner (too long in the bath, he supposed). It stirred a titter that was somehow very satisfying, and he tried to put away the morning with it. And the day before.

He tried to tell himself that whatever had gotten Ambrose and Azkadellia together this morning, up in that tree, was for the last time. That something _had_ been fixed, last night, and so whatever it was the two of them had had could end, with just the final throes. And besides, they wouldn't have anywhere to perch, if they tried again. It was a petty victory, but he needed something.

Azkadellia didn't come to dinner, no matter how many times DG went and tried to coax her out, and Cain was satisfied by that, too, like his territory had been appropriately marked and the last rival had finally skulked away.

That felt a little petty, too, to be so pleased by it, but he found he didn't much care.

 

***************

 

"So, DG and Raw!" Ambrose had whispered, conspiratorially, as they left the palace. "Who'd have guessed?"

"Raw, I'd venture."

"Oh, well, yes, him. But he's in touch with the future. Anyway, they looked happy!" Ambrose said, giddily, squeezing Cain's elbow tightly, as they stumbled along towards home. It was dark, he was tipsy, and still a little off balance from the visit with the surgeon, though he hadn't explained exactly why it was that that meeting had made him list and swoon. 

"It must be easier," he went on, after a dizzy spell, "being an empath, in a relationship. You know, just knowing everything that's going on in someone's heart. Not having to play any guessing games, read for clues..."

"Must be," Cain said, smirking a little in spite of himself. He imagined somehow it wouldn't be as easy as all that.

"Then again," Cain asked, slowly, "if I were an empath, would I know why you're, uh... walking on the diagonal? Or how it went, this afternoon? You didn't say a word about it at dinner." Or about a lot of other things, Cain added silently, and then wondered if the internal commentary he'd been running today was entirely healthy.

"I did, too," Ambrose said, bristling slightly. "You were just too late to hear it. Still scrubbing, I suppose," he teased.

"All right, fair," Cain said, nodding, and caught Ambrose when his uneasy gait came out from under him, again. "But could you see your way to repeating it? Or do I have to go back and ask Raw?"

"Well... All right. Though I'm not sure I can really see my way to anything, right now, it's so dark already. Gods, how far is it back to the cottage? It's never seemed to take this long, before..."

Cain sighed. Why was Ambrose running interference, again? About this morning, he could understand, of course; he'd been Unfaithful (probably), so it wasn't a surprising lie. But why cover up the appointment? Cain swallowed back on a nauseating touch of renewed suspicion.

"Well," he reminded, as coolly as he could, "it's usually light out, and we're usually sober, and the ground's usually drier. We're facing more resistance than usual."

"I'll say!"

I'll say, agreed Cain, silently, and then scolded himself for it. "Speaking of resistance," he prompted, instead.

"What?"

"The appointment.

"Oh," Ambrose said, his voice thin. "Well. Um. Inconclusive, you know," he evaded. "Couldn't really tell much by looking. But they thought it looked basically okay?" He grinned unconvincingly as a guilty child.

Cain frowned in return. "They couldn't?"

"Couldn't what?"

"Couldn't tell much by looking," Cain explained, almost patiently. "They're the ones who did the surgery in the first place, weren't they?"

"Well, yes," Ambrose admitted. "Oh, you tidied up the wood pile, that looks much better!"

"And stocked it. That's not really important right now, you realize?" 

"There's no need to be snippish, Cain," Ambrose snipped.

"Right," Cain agreed, and let it be for the last of the distance to the cottage, so he'd have enough time to get a civil tongue back in his head. When he got to the door, he bent to unlace his boots, so he didn't trail mud, and sent Ambrose in ahead of him.

"Why don't you settle down on the sofa," he said, quite gently, really. "I'll make us up some tea, you can tell me more about what happened today, okay?"

"Okay," Ambrose said, a little ashamed in the face of Cain's kindness, and fidgeted. "Okay, you're right. I'm sorry, it just makes me so tense to go in there..."

"I know," Cain said, and nodded. He took less relish in lighting the stove, this time, than before, but only slightly. He set the kettle up, and then came back to sit down heavily beside Ambrose, who looked a little small on the cushions. "So," he said, and patted Ambrose's knee, awkwardly.

"So."

Cain looked at Ambrose.

Ambrose looked at his folded hands.

 

****************

 

Across the grounds, Azkadellia was peering out through the weak blue sheer curtains at her window. Feeling faint, she pushed her gaze out far, towards the woods and the little blot on the landscape, there, that was the cottage. She thought she could see the smoke coming out of its tiny chimney in the dark, as it blurred the land beyond, and muffled the strange, subtle scar on the landscape where the tree-- _her_ tree--had been, and now wasn't.

She knew in her skin that it was burning.

So she drew slow and deep on her pipe, and held the smoke in until she could feel that burning inside of her, too, and her head grew foggy with it. She held it in until she could imagine starting her own little fires, again. And she held it in until a black peace finally washed over her vision and she sank to the floor, where the smoke seeped out of her belly and into her world.

 

*****************

 

"All right, all right," Ambrose murmured, after a while, trying to shoo Cain's persistent gaze with a hand. "So, so, it was like this. I went in, they talked to me for a while, said I was sounding fantastically better."

Cain nodded, in what he hoped was an encouraging way.

"Right. And then... well." He twisted his fingers around one another, linking and unlinking. When they, um, went to unzip me, talking all this time about how they could finally take out 'my horrible zipper,' I don't know, I just... I kind of... had a little problem." 

Cain sank. "What... kind of problem?"

"I'm not sure," Ambrose admitted. His voice was weak, and a little sick, but he was smiling from nerves. "I, um. I started to panic and went from just--just feeling the zipper catch a bit to... ah... waking up from the sedation. I gather I... I had a sort of an episode and... knocked down two attendants." He closed his eyes, tightly. "And I hit a surgeon, too. Before they got me with something to slow me down. Obviously something that didn't quite agree with me," he added, a little indignant, "my coordination's shot. It's still hanging on a bit."

The kettle started to whistle, and he looked up, startled. The glitch-hand shot up to point at it, too, although it wasn't aimed quite properly. Ambrose laughed a bit, at it, mirthlessly. "As if to illustrate the point," he sighed. "It's this side, mostly, pulling me off."

Cain obeyed the hand's direction wordlessly and pushed up to go fetch the kettle.

At the palace, DG was breaking into Azkadellia's room, again, to stamp out the bedspread, where it was singed and beginning to smoke from the spilled pipe.

Ambrose went on, as Cain gathered mugs.

"It's been so long since I've had one of those... spells," he murmured. "It was frightening. I don't know, there was something so upsetting about hearing them tell me how well things were going."

Cain poured the tea, and came back, setting the mugs down on the table. "They _are_ going well," he said, as tenderly as he could. "A lot better than they were, anyway."

"I know," Ambrose moaned, frustrated. "Of course I do, it wasn't that. But I couldn't stand it." He was looking a little panicked again, in fact.

"Why not? It's a good thing," Cain reasoned.

"Because I'm not done, yet," Ambrose said, a little wild as he gripped the sofa. "I'm not--I'm not ready to be done, and be all patched up and you gone all hours and working and I can't find you when I need you."

Cain tried to absorb this. He backed up to the beginning (a skill he had nearly perfected, after so much practice), and started with, "Done with what?"

Ambrose's eyes darted up vaguely towards his zipper.

"Do you mean you're not ready for surgery?" Cain asked, trying to parse it.

"I mean that I--that I need the zipper."

Cain blinked, and fought down unease. "Okay," he said. "You need the zipper. Why?"

Ambrose gaped at the question, and glanced around for an escape route. Cain was too close, though, and the little table was nearly against his knees. He wouldn't have a clear shot, he'd be caught in a moment. "I... I'm not sure," he said. He was speaking too quickly. "No, that's a lie, too, I know, I just..."

"Then just spit it out, Ambrose," Cain said, kindly.

This seemed to help, if only a little. Very slowly, Ambrose said, "I think I need to be able to see it. I--I kind of don't believe it's all there, otherwise? And I'm so used to being able to just... open it." He closed his eyes, and wrapped his arms tightly around himself. "She used to tease me with it, but it felt so, so..."

Cain swallowed back at the sourness on his tongue and tried not to grimace. He looked away, just in case.

"And..."

"And what?" Cain asked, a little too eagerly. Anything but thinking of Azkadellia and Ambrose and the zipper.

"And I--I want to keep it. It's a scar. It's proof, isn't it?" He let out a sharp, pained breath, and hugged himself tighter. "I want to wear it into town, and not even wear a hat, because I _want_ to be stopped. I want--I want horrible thugs and nasty Tin Men to harass me for being a headcase, like they always did, so that I can _show_ them, so that I have an excuse to show them. Show everyone. I want to just open my skull and have my gleaming, whole brain, right there in public, and say 'Look, I'm back, now, almost.'" He turned his face to Cain and opened his eyes wide. They were beading. "I want to tell them everything about it." The glitch hand darted out to wrap itself into Cain's shirt, and clutch him closer. "I do. I want to find everyone who ever hated me and feared me for it and grab them and say, 'I was a head case because I was better than you. I was a headcase because of Her, and because I tried to stop her, and where were you?'" He shook Cain for emphasis. "'Where were you..?'" he repeated, weakly.

"I was in a tin box," Cain said, a little stiffly, just to remind Ambrose who he was talking to. Just to remind him where he was, now. Ambrose's eyes were too far away, and it alarmed him.

Ambrose blinked at him, and seemed to come back from where he was. Most of the way back, at least. After a long moment, he said, "Yes." He nodded, and pulled Cain in closer, to lay his head on his shoulder. "Yes, you were. I know."

Cain wrapped his arms around Ambrose, and tried again to banish the morning, and the day before. He laid his cheek on the zipper, and let it bite him, just a little, and focused. "But you can do that, if you want to, sweetheart. So long as I'm there. Don't want you getting into anything too deep."

Ambrose mumbled his assent.

"You don't have to have it taken out, if you don't want."

Ambrose shook his head, slightly.

Cain closed his eyes, and rubbed Ambrose's back. The tea was forgotten, again. The glitch hand was fighting to thread fingers into all of Cain's buttonholes at once.

They stayed there a long time, until the tree had started to crumble, in the stove, and the room was warm with it. And then, not sure what he was doing, Cain lifted his face away, a little, and reached a hand up to the tab of Glitch's zipper.

He took a deep breath, and tugged it slowly open, as smoothly as he could, to look inside.

Ambrose started to shake, in his arms, his shoulders tensed and trying to crawl up his back.

"It's still there," Cain said, though his voice was unsteady. "You're all there."

"Am I?" Ambrose whispered.

"Yes," Cain promised. "But I'll keep checking, to make sure, any time you like."

He closed Ambrose's skull back up, and laid his chin on top of it, so that Ambrose was tucked close, his cheek pressed to Cain's heart. He felt his shirt soak through almost immediately. But he held him there and breathed deep until he could feel his pulse mirrored off of Ambrose's skin. 

It's still there, he told himself as he marked the beats, and ached.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes irrational and semi-rational behavior, a cheap excuse, a brass key, and a window.   
>  Warnings: Jealousy, suspicion, and some potentially very bad ideas. Also, a bit of a cliff-hanger.

Cain didn't dream, much.

He supposed he'd got in all the dreaming he was entitled to, during those years in the box, when the dreams had wandered in and out of his imposed nightmares, impossible to parse. After all those years of phantoms, he reckoned his brain was done with anything that wasn't solid. He tried to leave his imagination behind, too, while he was at it.

He didn't really miss it much.

But when it did come out, now, it was a force. Images bored into his brain, and he watched them, struck dumb, unable to shake them off. It was like one of those horrible things Ambrose had invented--it stuck and repeated and rolled over him in a crushing circuit until something finally broke through and smashed it. Something solid. Something powerful distracting.

Cain wondered if that was what Ambrose's flashbacks felt like, too--if it felt like being jailed in that box, unable to step in and change anything. Was he just trapped, watching it happen, living it over and over again?

He wondered if Ambrose felt lost and half mad from it, too. 

He didn't want to ask.

So he added it to the list of things he wasn't asking. There was too much that had taken up there in the last few weeks for it to suffer from just one more question; things like, "How many times did you meet Azkadellia in the woods?" And, "What did you do there?" And, _"Why?"_

His imagination had awoken from dormancy to take up those questions with more vigor than he thought was strictly necessary. It searched out every potential moment, every stray comment, with the Tin Man's tenacity for stray detail, and a new lover's penchant for suspicion.

Cain trawled miserably back through the months, and netted all the times Ambrose had fled to the tree. But he'd found him there, himself, most of those times, dazed and alone, so he sifted through for just the times that Ambrose had come back on his own, before Cain could find him--times he'd surely been conscious of what he was doing. He tried to count the times (another half dozen, maybe) that Ambrose had left a note, or come back with the berries that seemed to grow only by that tree (damning evidence if he'd ever seen any), and tried to remember what Ambrose had looked like, those times, when he got home--were there more scratches on his skin, those times? Leaves in his hair? Did he smell different than he usually did? Did he _act_ differently? 

Cain's imagination said yes, yes, there must have been, he must have done. He should have known, somehow, seen. Ambrose had been nervous and fretted, whenever he'd come back with berries, hadn't he? He'd been too sweet, and too contrite, and a little breathless. And Cain could fill in the rest too blurry to really recall--a little something in the way he moved, guilt in his eyes... Once Cain even invented a scrap of incriminating fabric that he was almost certain hadn't existed, but which had a certain satisfyingly enraging quality. But that, he reasoned, was what the imagination was for--filling in the details you wanted (or didn't want) to see, whether or not they'd been there before.

It seemed like he couldn't escape it, now. 

If he held still for more than a few minutes, was left to his thoughts, the sick ache of it made a fog around him. He _dwelled._ And it made him feel righteous and guilty at once.

He found himself checking Ambrose for scars, whenever his skin was bare. But there were too many to be able to keep track of the canvas with a casual glance.

Cain started breathing more deeply around Ambrose, too, trying to better learn the smell of him. He wouldn't miss a wrong note, in future, would not miss a promise of trespass. But now that they were stepping out a little, every day tracked in something new, dust or sunlight or grass, to murmur over and muddle the essential Ambrose, and Cain's knowledge was imperfect.

The wild, jealous thought that he should just lock Ambrose up for a few days of pointed observation appealed to something mean and low in him. Cain was desperate to memorize him, now, wanted to know every bit of him, and if holing him up and smelling his hair and tasting his skin on the hour could mean he knew Ambrose well enough to catch him in Infidelity, or in anything else, it seemed worth it. At least it did in the very small hours of the night, when he was lying awake, watching over him and not dreaming at all.

 

***

Ambrose dreamed too much.

He vaguely remembered times, fifteen and twenty years before, when his brain would invent fantastical things in the night--impossible creatures and surreal situations and strange machines that he'd try to build on paper, the next morning. He remembered fiction, stark and clear, and possibility. Now it was hard to tell what was what.

It seemed like an unfair portion of his night-time wandering was taken up with history, now. He felt that the desired ratio of memory to creation in dreams was something like 3 : 78, but he seemed to dream it on a 1 : 1 basis, these days, and they crossed in and out of one another until it was hard to tell which had been which, which had happened once, long before, and what had never happened at all.

But it was better, at least, than when the dreams mixed with waking.

How many times had he woken up under that tree, from dreams of running from Azkadellia's lair? How many times had he fled his _home,_ certain it was his prison, and fled Cain, certain he was his guard?

And how many times had he dreamt that _she_ was there, and then woken up to see her leaving? Or with the smell of her hair under his nose, and the thrill of guilt in his skin? Uncertain of how much of what he'd just dreamed had happened?

He couldn't sieve out life from the ghosts in the night, anymore. He had a nauseous certainty that he'd done very bad things, things trespassing and unkind, those mornings. He half remembered delicious cruelty and horrible delight. But what had he meant of it? How much had he chosen?

He didn't know. And that was almost as frightening. 

Sometimes, on very dark nights, he wished Cain would just lock him up and keep him well heeled. (Like Azkadellia had done, he thought, and felt sick.) If Cain could just stop him from acting out whatever caught and moved him, he'd never have to have another awkward conversation with Her. He'd never again wind up on his knees, trying to beg out of her what in the world they'd done _that_ time.

 

***************

 

Things were changing.

In just two days, the world had upended and almost righted itself again; they'd had it out in the woods and made an awkward kind of love on the floor in tangles that put them back together. And Cain had caught Ambrose at--something, anyway--in the woods, and felled the tree, taking away the opportunity to catch him at anything again. Ambrose had been cleared as stable enough, and had made sure the diagnosis didn't stand. They'd seen the world, and hidden again. 

On the surface, at least, the storm had picked them up and dropped them right back where they'd started, with little but new firewood and new promises to show for it, between them. But that illusion didn't hold up much longer or much better than the surgeon's pronouncement of Ambrose's readiness for a normal life had.

The few weeks that passed after those eventful two days were a little strange, but neither acknowledged it out loud. They did act on their little promises, and stepped out to the palace, now and again. They walked the wide path around the woods to the bridge over the stream, and all the way into town, and Ambrose didn't wear a hat unless the wind was up and chilling his zipper. His face was too familiar, so near the palace, though, so no one dared mention it, dared make something of his fantasy of confrontation. Especially not with a very dour Cain beside him.

"Looks like we'll have to go further out into the sticks to find you a fight," Cain said, one day, and Ambrose said it was all right if they didn't. They walked home, warm with drink, while the glitch hand clutched hard and fond around Cain's elbow. When they reached the bridge, and the wind started to beat out the liquor, Cain shifted to wrap his arm around Ambrose's shoulders, instead, and tucked him closer than the chill.

So their outside-world embargo was being broken with moderate success.

But other things changed, too.

Ambrose wondered why Cain had stopped expressing an interest in going to work any time soon, for instance, but since he not-so-secretly preferred this, himself, he tried not to bring it up. Cain being home was joy enough that he didn't need to examine it. 

And in fact, even as he saw more of their local universe, he was somehow seeing more of Cain--it seemed like the man was never out of his sight at all, these days. Ambrose liked that quite a lot.

But he had to admit that it was a bit unusual.

It happened in stages, gently and gradually, and the first thing that helped to secure more time together was the lock.

It had always been very hard to share the bed, which both agreed was disappointing, especially in light of recent days' advancements. There was enough room, and it always started well, but Ambrose had never broken his tendency to bolt if Cain held him in the night, so most nights had closed with one or the other of them resigned to the cot (which they placed near the bed, at least), or sleeping out on the sofa. But then Cain had the very clever idea of installing a key lock on the bedroom door, and latches on the windows.

It was perfect, they agreed. It wouldn't keep a sane Ambrose from being able to get up and start an early day--he could fetch the key from the cord around Cain's neck, or just wake Cain to rise with him--but it would surely prove a sufficient deterrent to a panicked Ambrose trying to flee the room in the dark. Maybe, they said, it would even help him shake the habit! Hopeful, they began to try to share the bed.

It was wonderful. They'd settle in, and Cain would roll and wrap an arm around him, spooning him up tight and close. Ambrose, blissful, would tangle their ankles together while Cain nipped his shoulder or nosed up against his scalp and smelled his hair. Ambrose fell to sleep sound and well.

And then, three mornings in a row, Ambrose woke up on the floor, curled up against the door.

Still, they stuck with it, and it did get a little better, if slowly. Ambrose started to wake up from his state of abjection early enough to crawl back into bed for a few more hours' sleep under Cain's arm, and Cain's body would take the chill of the floor back out of his. He'd find himself warm and less sore by the morning, although he was unable to move much for how tightly Cain was holding him. He decided it was a sign of love, and let it be.

But, he had to admit...

After two weeks of this, there started to be nights, here and there, when he woke up in the midst of fumbling helplessly with the door, rather than after he'd already given up on it and taken up a despondent vigil on the floor. Other nights, the sounds of his panic woke Cain (or Cain wasn't sleeping, that night), and he was fetched and firmly steered back to the bed. This only resulted in a few bruises, and usually Ambrose came out of it fairly soon, before he'd done any real damage.

Other nights went differently.

 

***

Glitch tried desperately to budge the lock.

He knew he'd need to be almost silent--what if he woke someone?--but he still had to try it. He was better than this, or at least he had been, once. He couldn't really remember, now. But if he gave in completely, he'd surely go mad in his servility and shame.

For a moment, he thought he must have already done that. A hundred times, at least.

But he pressed on. When what felt like an age had passed, though, and it still wouldn't give, and he was finally too tired to keep trying, and too sore and humiliated to risk another night on the floor, he laid his face against the door and sighed. Perhaps it was time to give in after all. Perhaps a happy madness was better than this righteous, fleeting, crushing sanity.

They'd gotten too good for him, he knew. He would probably never make it out of here, not until She decided to let him out. _If_ she decided. So he wiped his eyes on his wrists, and his hands on his sides, to dry away the sweat and the smell of brass, and crawled back across the floor to the bed.

Servility and shame, his mind repeated to him, and he smiled bitterly as he curled up on the end of the mattress, careful to disturb it as little as he could.

At least it was peaceful.

***

 

Ambrose woke up from dreams like that in an odd mood. And on the end of the bed, of course.

A traitorous part of him said that the dog in him was right--that heeling was good and simple and better. And the fighter in him said that that was a terrible thing to say, and the lover agreed, although for different reasons. But his mood was well suited, those mornings, to just lying calm on top of the blanket with his head at Cain's feet, watching the keyhole.

Sometimes a wish comes true so slowly that you don't quite realize it's happening. 

 

***

 

Spending the entire night, every night, with Cain made Ambrose very happy. But it seemed like, as far as having more time together was concerned, that it was only the beginning. 

Ambrose hadn't realized there were still so many hours in a day that they'd been spending apart from one another--on chores, walks, sometimes baths or naps or if Ambrose was writing or drafting--until those hours were gone. Cain had gotten over his shyness quickly (but then, after the way they'd spent That Night, it wasn't too surprising), and now he stayed in the room and looked at Ambrose unabashed while he dressed and undressed. He sat in and read while Ambrose bathed, or joined him outright. Protestations of modesty or uncertainty were gone entirely. When he needed to work outside the cottage, Cain even made sure had something for Ambrose to do nearby, as well, and he hardly watched what he was doing for watching his mate.

If Ambrose hadn't been so desperately grateful for the chaperone, it might have been a bit unnerving. But he had been, so he settled into it with relative ease.

It was certainly bolstering, in its way. Ambrose had long had the sense that, though Cain clearly loved him, he didn't particularly like the sight of him--not that he disliked it, just that he couldn't have cared much at all, one way or another, about how Ambrose looked. And he felt a little silly to worry about it, felt he should have been above that sort of thing, but someone as dashing as he had been going unnoticed? His efforts to clean his hair and button his clothes had felt positively wasted. But now, he wasn't so sure.

Those times he'd practically thrown himself, heated, at Cain now prickled with less embarrassment, in memory, because Cain had grabbed _him,_ carried _him_ off. And now Cain stared at _him,_ was now the one who looked so hungry.

If Ambrose slipped out of a room, he even felt a bit hunted, for the speed with which Cain noticed and closed the distance, again. And that was good, too, he supposed.

But it was certainly a little unusual.

 

******

 

One day, the Queen asked Ambrose to tea. For old times' sake, she said, and begged his presence, so Cain let him go alone. Ambrose asked him nervously for help with buttoning his coat and combing his hair, and after went around behind to kiss behind Cain's ear, which Cain found gratifying, before he set off across the grounds.

And for a while, Cain was content, and did sit quietly at home and keep busy.

He worked at tilling the garden for the later spring plants, and he tended what they'd sown when the earth was still hard from last frost, thick green things only now daring to bush out. He pulled weeds and pinched back scraggly growth.

Cain swept out the cottage, and opened all the windows, and then shut a few, because the wind was too much and blew dust back in over the floors. And when he made the bed up, it was too severe, so he sat on it and mussed the pillows so it wouldn't stress Ambrose, who could be funny about things like that. He got up to tuck the cot away under the bed, so they could hopefully forget about it, and then he made the mistake of sitting back down to rest for a few minutes.

He started to wonder what excuse he could find to go to the palace, to check on his mate.

His let his eyes wander over the room. He made a mental list of what he'd done, and tried to think of other things he could productively do, though it was short. He checked the buttons of his shirt, because he thought he remembered that one was loose, and he found it just over the door key.

That wasn't surprising. He checked for it so frequently, unconsciously, that he must have disturbed the buttons on a lot of his shirts, there. He drew the key out to look at it.

It was still on a long cord around his neck. Cain was wearing it all the time, now; whenever he had taken the warm brass thing off, before, it had left the place over his heart feeling naked and chilled, and when he tried to put it back, it was so cold it burned him. Better to not have to worry about it, he'd supposed, and besides, Ambrose hadn't said anything about it. He hadn't even tried to touch it.

Privately, Cain had decided Ambrose wouldn't have much of a say in it, anyway, even if he ever did raise it. And those strange, hard thoughts had stopped worrying him so much, lately. There were too many for him to see his way through them, anymore; they were starting to look normal and sensible.

Suspicion is a terrible thing.

With a burst of inspiration, Cain let the cooling key drop back into his shirt, and shot up to check the cupboards for low stores.

 

**************

 

Ambrose arrived ten minutes early, and stood outside of the Queen's parlor door for so long that he was several minutes late in meeting her. He couldn't make himself move until he heard what he thought was nervous, uncomfortable movement from within.

He was terrified of entering--to see her, alone, like he had when he'd had all his marbles and manners and memories and everything else--but more terrified of keeping her waiting longer than he had already, so he took a few brief, stabilizing breaths, and entered.

He walked as slowly and formally as he could, to her, and did not mention his tardiness. She'd know he'd been there; there hadn't been new footsteps in the hall before he'd come in. And she was kind; she wouldn't mention it either.

"My Queen," Ambrose said reverently as he took awkwardly to a knee, to take her hand into both of his.

Or he tried to, at least. While the rest of his body pulled towards the old habits, the only semi-conscious ones that lived deep in his bones, the glitch hand was too busy careening away, fussing with the hem of her dress, to heed the call to formality and respect. So he held her left hand in his right, and bowed his forehead to the backs of her fingers, silently horrified and hoping she didn't mind so much.

She didn't seem to. She touched the top of his head gingerly, fondly, and relief melted through him, washing him with a thin ease. He thought her thumb was resting across some of the teeth of his zipper, and he smiled at the floor.

The swell of love and pride and devotion that engulfed him at that little fondness felt foreign, it had been so long away. But he knew it had been familiar, once. How long had it been since he'd been an advisor? How many annuals had passed so strangely? He could hardly count them, anymore, it felt like a lifetime ago, little more than a half-remembered dream. Once, he'd been so clean, so perfect and collected and even innocent, in his way. He felt like an outsider, these days, like he was stepping into her presence for the first time, all over again, every time--like he was merely pretending at belonging here.

Her thumb brushed back over the place where the zipper joined his scalp. He'd never hold that post again, he was certain. His judgment was still good enough, at least, to tell him he couldn't take it if she offered it, but also to know that she wouldn't offer it to him. It was still good enough that he knew it wasn't much better than that, at all.

But a confidante? He could do that. Maybe.

Ambrose shifted as unobtrusively as he could, from one knee to the other, because the first was sore of the tile. There was a quiet between them that lasted a long time, and he was content to wait it out, even if he'd have to switch back to the other knee, again. It was a sweet quiet, but there was something sad about it, and something right. 

"Ambrose..." the Queen said, finally, and he recognized the thickness in her voice, the faint promise of emotion, even though it had been years since he'd heard it.

"Oh, don't cry," he begged, before he could stop himself, looking up into her eyes, "I'm no good at strong fronts, anymore." He gave her knuckles a bracing kiss, and squeezed her hand. "If you cry, I'll cry..."

She gave a hiccoughed little laugh, as she took his face in her hands. "It seems to be too late for that, friend." And it was true; her eyes were merely threatening, but Ambrose's had already given up the fight. So she swiped her thumbs delicately over his cheeks as he smiled and turned his eyes away, ashamed.

The Queen sighed and shook her head, smiling. "Oh, Ambrose, what shall we do?"

"I don't know," he admitted, and his glitch hand wrapped itself carelessly over one of hers. "We could... we could start with you telling me what's wrong on your side," he offered, sniffing. "For old times' sake."

 

***

 

Twenty minutes later, the Queen and her erstwhile advisor had settled onto the floor like children, the Queen drifting in the massive pile of satin that was her skirt, and Ambrose in a ragdoll's awkward tangle of limbs, while they conferenced quietly. They'd rarely sat that way, before, even when they were young and the world hadn't yet fallen apart; there were formalities to be observed, and cagey advances to be made and accepted. But when they had behaved as they had to behave, the pull of that old, frank comfort they had sometimes felt in the hardest times, on the coldest days, tugged at Ambrose painfully. He begged outright for permission to settle down on the ground with her, like they had one fleeting afternoon he half-remembered, away from thrones and formal tables and the rest. After all, they were not so young as they'd been, before the fall; he couldn't perch on one knee for so long, anymore, and her back hurt her too much to endlessly stand. It would be best.

So they'd clambered down onto the rug, their heads so near they almost touched, and it was frequently all Ambrose could do to sequester his errant hand from reaching out to her. He wasn't sure why it was behaving so badly; perhaps something in the shock of this ancient dynamic had shaken him, and lost him his hold on it, he thought. Though maybe it was the nearness of the surgeons, who had upset him so. Or maybe it was that this was the first time he'd been without Cain, his rock and anchor, in weeks, and he'd grown chemically dependent and unable to handle himself without its influence.

He shifted a little further away, to lie out on his stomach, putting his hand a little further out of reach, and with it that traitorous thought.

And when Cain, crumpled list of non-essential pantry items stuffed in his pocket, glimpsed them through the half-closed door, that was how he found them.

He quickly ducked away, satisfied, and thought he didn't feel nearly as foolish as he ought to have.

 

***

 

Cain spent far longer in the kitchens than was necessary. His list was skeletal, at best. But he needed time to let the prickling in his skin settle, and to come up with a few more things they might need, to help excuse his shady trip.

Plus, if he waited long enough, he might be able to walk Ambrose home. It was quiet in the palace, that afternoon, and he hoped he'd be able to hear Ambrose passing in the hall beyond, whenever it happened.

But he didn't.

And didn't.

So he put away the things he'd fetched from the larder, things that could spoil too easily, and decided on more nuts and dried peas and things Ambrose might like better. They'd last through a vigil better than eggs and meats would, too.

(And didn't pass, and didn't pass.)

Cain finally gave up, gathered his bag, and charted a route through the castle that would take him by the little parlor Ambrose and the Queen had been in again, thinking he could pretend at being turned around.

This time it was empty.

 

**************

"I don't know," Ambrose said, weakly. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea..." 

Ambrose was pressed flat back against the door, trying to stay out of the fog of Azkadellia's pipe smoke. She was sitting all the way across the room, by the window, but Ambrose felt like he had found the last corner of clear air, and felt claustrophobic .

Cain was on the other side of the door, back pressed up against Ambrose's, through the wood.

Suspicion is a terrible thing. Through suspicion, everything is fraught with wickedness.

"I am. You _want_ to."

 _That,_ Cain noted, with a sick triumph, was the sound of Azkadellia, sullen and taunting. He'd guessed this must be her room. He was less surprised than he wanted to be.

"But, Azkadellia..." Ambrose pleaded, as if just to confirm for Cain that that was the person he was with, just in case he'd been mistaken.

"Didn't Mommy tell you to come make me happy?" Azkadellia purred.

"She--Azkadellia--not like that..."

Azkadellia drifted closer, and in so doing, flushed Ambrose from the corner like a bird from a bush. "You'd love to, though, wouldn't you?" she said. Her predatory tone was clear, through the door. "You're a good boy, you would..."

Cain hung on their voices, pressing his pounding head as hard up against the wood as he could, but as she drifted away, deeper into the room, after Ambrose, his pulse was mostly too loud to hear over. 

He fancied there were Sounds, though. 

With that, he had created Certainty. He waited for the well of Anger, the thrill of Rage and Betrayal, the need to tear through the door and React.

Instead, it felt like something cold had trickled into his chest, down in between his ribs, like pins and needles only over his heart, and he pushed his palm over it. He felt the key more than the thump of beating, and it wondered if it had just stopped. He felt like he had fallen into that frozen lake, again. 

He felt sick. 

So he gathered his sack of food, straightened his hat on his head, and trudged home.

 

****

 

"I would not," Ambrose snapped, cornered. He, too, felt the cold grip of panic in his chest, but it was so familiar to him, now, that he knew at least that he wasn't having an attack or dying. He could almost ignore it.

"You would like it. At least a little." She backed off enough to settle back into the window frame. "And besides, I thought you were here to help, _Glitch._ "

He had been wrong; he couldn't ignore the feeling. The panic rose, and he began to feel frantic. "N-no, I really don't think that's what your mother had in mind, Princess..." Gods, why had he even agreed to come see her?

"I don't care what my mother had in mind. This is more fitting."

"Please," Ambrose begged, "let's just... let's just talk about what's wrong. Or let's not! And I'll just leave and I'll tell your mother I couldn't do anything. Whatever you do on your own is none of my business..."

Azkadellia scoffed. "If she thinks a little heart to heart is going to fix things--"

"--Azkadellia, you asked for me specifically--"

"--then she's mistaken. Of course I did, you're a good start." She crossed her arms. "And if you are utterly incapable, someone else won't be. Maybe your little Tin Man," she baited, arching her eyebrows.

As his stray hand pointed at her as menacingly as it could, Ambrose stammered, "He'd never--you--leave him be, or--" 

"Or?" she asked, innocent as a child. "Or what, Ambrose?"

Ambrose looked down at the floor, fuming impotently.

"Look, Ambrose, my friend--my only friend--it won't be hard to help me," she soothed, if you could call it that. "And we're not all that high up, barely higher than that balcony I pushed you from all those years ago, do you even remember that?"

"Than--than the witch pushed me off of, you mean," Ambrose insisted, desperate to correct her. Desperate to be right.

"Fine. Anyway," she dismissed it with a wave, "shouldn't you be begging me for the opportunity?" She sounded excited. "If I only wind up broken on the ground, which is probably likely, since we're only on the second floor, you'll even get the chance to come finish me off, bare hands and all." She wrapped her own hands around her throat, feathering her fingers out, as if to demonstrate. "Won't that be satisfying?"

Ambrose pictured her--couldn't help but picture her--that way, in a twisted heap of bones on the ground, by the path Cain was even now drifting along, unbeknownst to them. The glitch hand was twittering blindly out to the side, now, as if it had less restraint than he, and it probably did. Ambrose kept it well, well away. "I couldn't--I could never--" Bile was rising so thick in his throat that he couldn't speak. 

"Of course you could," Azkadellia said, too sweetly, too softly. She fanned her fingers slowly out over the sill, and leaned, just slightly, back. 

Ambrose shut his eyes. Both his hands had curled into fists.

"Come on, Ambrose, old friend," she said, a little harder, "just push me out the window."


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently no one's adjusted, anymore. Old wounds are reopened, new wounds are sustained, and "just because something seems like a good idea at the time doesn't mean you should actually do it" applies. Do not try this at home. Warnings: Hypothetical situations, what should probably be considered a nervous breakdown, and violence (oooo, violence!). Also, a cheap cliff-hanger.

Cain's mood was... empty.

By the time he'd reached the stairwell, he couldn't even feel the cold inside, anymore. By the time he'd reached the bottom of the steps and was blindly wandering for a door, he felt a little like nothing. Or maybe like an empty box, like a little black room with the lights off, or not hooked up at all. 

He wondered if he was dead, and just hadn't stopped walking around, yet. 

That might explain it, mightn't it? He'd just taken dead, outside Azkadellia's door, and now his body was trying to find its way home to lie down in the dirt. It was good dirt, at home, soft from tilling, and it would take him.

His mind had started working a little bit, which was something, he supposed, but that could be a crude mechanical thing. None of the gears or cogs that turned touched anything worth mentioning, anything real. None of them reached inside and levered against soul or heart.

He felt black and empty as a shadow.

He tried to think, because there was nothing else--he hardly heard the mutter of the palace, hardly saw the doors, hardly felt the floor. Concisely, he tried, "Food," thinking of the bag in his grip. "Cool," he thought, of the air, when he stepped out of a door. And "Ambrose," he thought, but without much meaning. That one was too big to touch.

"Wyatt Cain," he tried, sure that this, too, would be futile, too abstract, but a cog turned slowly, and a lever knocked a memory loose. 

Wyatt. When had he last been called Wyatt? He never heard that name, any more.

"Cain," he thought, experimentally. Ambrose always called him Cain, didn't he? He'd never known lovers to call each other by their surnames, like workmen or Tin Men would have, brusque and jovial over a pit or a body or a bottle; maybe Ambrose just didn't remember any other name for him. But whatever the reason, Cain liked it (or he remembered liking it, anyway; he couldn't muster much of anything passing for emotion, right then). It seemed familiar and old and unsentimental. Or, at least, unfussy. It seemed to fit. 

It wouldn't have done for a young romance. No pretty girl he was courting would have called him "Cain." But between broken men, it felt right. He'd definitely liked it. If Ambrose had called him Wyatt, it would have been as though... as though...

"Adora," he thought, suddenly, fleetingly.

He was never called Wyatt, anymore. Not by anyone. Not by her. But she had called him Wyatt.

When had he stopped thinking about her? 

In spite of himself, of his bleak internal landscape, he thought about this, sluggishly and reluctantly, like a mule in mud. It did seem a little late to be hunkering down to face it--in fact, it felt like the least opportune moment possible--but he'd entwined with Ambrose so slowly, so inexorably, that he hadn't gotten much of a chance, along the way. There hadn't been some defining moment where he'd had to make a turn, make a choice, where he'd had to decide to accept or deny. Or, at least, he hadn't taken the time, if he'd had it.

He'd just put everything away, while the dust settled, like he was packing boxes for a move he wasn't going to make.

His life really was in boxes, locked apart, he decided; Cain even pictured the battered stacks. Maybe he wasn't any better than Ambrose, with his would-be filing cabinets, his locks and keys and notebooks, with all his life forgotten and lost and found and hidden again. Cain had pulled his life apart into pieces, and put Adora away.

Cain thought of Ambrose and Adora in the same breath, then, and almost stopped where he stood, almost fell from his feet.

But then he kept walking.

The boxes made it easier to deal with. He could push things into compartments, divided so none could touch another. It was easier, when there was no overlap between worlds, between lifetimes. Nothing would have to remind him of anything else.

Cain had liked that Ambrose hadn't call him Wyatt--he hadn't thought about why, until now, but he'd known it was important. There were a lot of things he'd liked Ambrose not to do.

Cain didn't want Ambrose to mend clothing ("like some prairie wife," wasn't that how he'd put it?). There were no animals, so Ambrose didn't call in any dogs at night, or tend any livestock, and that was good. Cain didn't want Ambrose to cook for him, though sometimes he'd still let him, but he didn't want Ambrose to help him wash his back, or to smile at him from a doorway, tired and comforted, when he got back from working a long day at something dangerous. He didn't want Ambrose to be waiting up for him to come home, and kiss him when he did.

He didn't want Ambrose to take care of him, that way, treat him that way. Adora had done. Every day of their lives, Adora had done.

Only Adora.

Ambrose didn't know how to fire a shotgun, so far as Cain knew, and Cain never wanted him to learn. He didn't want Ambrose to know how to dress wild animals (not that he would), or set traps (same). Adora could hunt, and it was a comfort that Ambrose never would. Cain didn't want there to be children around, either (though that was a safe bet), and he didn't want Ambrose to call him those names that mothers call fathers. He didn't want Ambrose to let his hair grow _too_ too long, and then shoo Cain away from fiddling with it because he'd only tangle it, anyway ('Leave it, you're as bad as the baby'). Adora had done those things, had been those ways.

He didn't want Ambrose to be anything like Adora, anything at all.

And he wasn't. Cain thought he should thank the gods for their absolute difference--he couldn't think of a single thing they shared--but in that moment, he couldn't think in gratitudes at all, any more than he could in affection. But maybe when he could, again, if he could, he'd try to be thankful.

It was safer, this way, wasn't it? Cain would never have to remember her by accident (except for now), never have to compare the two (except for now); he hadn't even thought of her in months, except for in snippets of dreams, when his jealousies and hurts had broiled up into tangled messes. There was nothing but his own body that they'd shared between them. 

Except... except Adora had liked to dance, too, hadn't she? 

She hadn't really been good at it. But, she liked doing it, and she'd done it without him, in the kitchen, with Jeb on her hip. She danced and sang their boy rabble-rousers to Raise Him Up Right, as she put it.

But they were nothing alike, beyond that.

Cain's eyes felt hot, the kind of scratching, dry heat eyes only feel when they're wet. He didn't pay it any mind.

No, Adora would never have fiddled with machinery, or with picking berries, either. She wasn't talky, and she wasn't silly, but neither did she brood; she was stern and sweet and lovely. Adora wasn't vulnerable, and didn't need to be protected--except when she did, that once.

Cain thought he felt something, then. A ghost of something like water, or sand, or loose earth. Not much.

They had that in common, too, then. They danced, and they made him feel helpless, when he thought of them. They made him feel like a failure. They made him feel like he was drowning, or being buried alive.

But Adora, and this was very, very important, he thought, would never, ever have betrayed him. She wasn't beyond suspecting him, but she'd never have stooped to running around on him, herself. She'd never have gone off into the woods after--oh, say, Zero. For instance.

"Zero," he thought, fairly clearly, and, for only the second or third time since he'd been caught, Cain wondered what had happened to him. He hadn't really wanted to know, and still didn't, but he spared a moment to wonder, anyway.

"Azkadellia," he thought, too, because the two still went together, in his head, but hers was a more nebulous shape. He felt a flicker of emotion, there, too; something hot and sick, low in his stomach, but he still couldn't form it into something solid. "Azkadellia," his brain tried again, trying to clarify her into a single point, instead of something so unspecific and looming. 

Cain really wasn't aware that she was looming in a much more literal sense. He wasn't aware that he'd circled the long way around, and wound up below the window where she was perched, asking Ambrose to push, strangle, kill. But as if he had asked her out loud, as if he had told the world that this cloud of sickness he felt of her needed to become a tangible, manageable thing, it did.

There was a strange hollow silence and a stranger thud that was very solid indeed, a few feet to the right of him.

Cain wondered numbly if he'd dropped his sack, if that sound was the thud of stores and canvas, but what he'd seen in his peripheral vision finally resolved into some kind of meaningful spectre in his thoughts, such as they were. Dark satin, so blue it was almost black. Dark hair, looking so black it was almost blue. So Cain stopped walking (drifting), and laid down his sack, turning inexorably to look.

"Azkadellia," he thought, again, still dimly, but it was not as void as before. Not nearly. He crouched, for a better look, though he didn't approach. Even so, she was almost near enough to touch.

Almost.

_Azkadellia._

...No, he _was_ close enough to touch, if just the tips of her hair, where it had come loose, and fallen near him. It wouldn't really take anything at all to wrap a coil of it around his hand, to make a fist, to pull.

He couldn't see clearly enough to know if there was blood, or not, breath, or not, but he thought maybe a little of each. The dark bleakness he was looking through was thick, but there was a start of a faint spark, inside, to see by, the smoldering greyness of a low ember of hurt and hate and unshaped impulse. And the burn of a certain satisfaction.

 

**********

 

There was a quailing cry from above, and Cain glimpsed (dimly) the shape of Ambrose in the window. Ambrose immediately clapped one hand over his purple mouth. The other (the glitch hand) was stretching as far out the window as it could, threatening to overbalance its master out and over the sill after the Princess.

Cain looked down at Azkadellia, again (her eyes were open, and she _was_ breathing, but there was a wet, uneasy kind of sound in it), and the ember in him caught and spread, until it glowed with a perverse and ugly light. He thought he saw the world all at once, then, by that light, saw all of that moment and all he could wreak in it. He reeled.

He saw a path, then, in vivid and sudden and certain detail, clearer than day. Before someone saw, before anyone could come out to find out what happened, he could just wrap that hair around his fist, and drag her away, like a trophy kill, like Adora had dragged birds by the plumes. He could carry Azkadellia out to the cottage, or even just into the woods, without a bit of strain, and he could keep her quietly, just as she had kept Ambrose; all skin and blood and rope and cruelty of every kind he could devise. And he had been a Tin Man, had survived the witch's reign; he had seen every kind of cruelty there was.

Azkadellia had taken some six or seven weeks to so thoroughly break Glitch, ruin him. In that time, Cain thought, he could wring Ambrose back out of her by force, scare her out of Ambrose by example. He could destroy her, piece by piece. 

He could destroy Ambrose, too. Or maybe just scare him bad enough that he'd toe the line. Maybe that would be better.

Cain touched the key over his heart, again, as something that might have passed for human emotion seemed to stir, there. Some touch of guilt, of relief.

...Yes, maybe that would be better after all. And maybe it was a good sign that he thought so. Maybe he still wanted Ambrose enough to break the precious, strange thing that he was, if it meant he could keep ahold of it. That could almost be called a good thing.

Cain fixed on it, anyway. That strange little breath made him feel half-human, again; it was a tangible sign that his heart might still be in there, somewhere, a sign that he might still have chains to tie him to that earth, which every man needed, when it came down to it.

He thought of Glitch's time with the witch, Ambrose's time with the princess, and everything he'd ever imagined between them, everything he'd feared, and it twisted his guts into knots, but that was good, too, because at least he could feel his insides, again. And in that reddish moment, Cain thought he could do it; he could follow that path and ruin them both forever, if he had to, he could hurt them and keep them and not think twice about it. He looked up at Ambrose, and then down, and filled his fist with Azkadellia's hair. He started to rise, to pull--

\--except, just like that, he thought twice, and the strange fantasy ended.

Ambrose freed his mouth enough to say, "Cain..." in the weakest voice, the most terrified, that Cain had ever heard. He sounded like a small animal in a trap. The kind Adora had had to Have Mercy On, more than twice.

Cain let go of Azkadellia's hair, and sat back to look up at the fragile thing above him, shaking a little of the fog from behind his eyes. He hung there for a long moment, while he and Ambrose stared at one another, after a fashion; their eyes didn't quite meet, but they saw enough.

And Cain's soul settled a little, finally, back into the cooler and dimmer. 

No; he oughtn't do it. He was better than that, at least a little.

Cain thought of Ambrose, again, whom he must love, after all, if it was enough to civilize him. He thought of traps. 

He thought he didn't have to kidnap, rape, torture to make a point. He was above that, even if the witch hadn't been. He was a merciful man, in the end.

Hazily, Cain crawled forward, to take a cautious look at the injured Princess, the bird fallen from the bough, to see how bad it was. He tried to judge her wounds. He tried to judge her wickedness.

Ambrose was saying something, but Cain wasn't listening.

Azkadellia's fingers (the ones she could move, the ones from the arm that was less broken than the other) started to flutter, feathery, where they had fallen by her throat. And her eyes--her clear, bright, focused eyes, lucid despite her silence and the blood and the cracked bones--seemed to hold a challenge. They burned, and looked wicked, indeed.

Cain looked at her and saw traps. He thought of Ambrose, caught mangled in them, and of himself, and even of her, and he thought of mercy.

 

******

 

Ambrose ran so fast he slipped more than twice, and only narrowly avoided cracking his own skull. He skipped stairs and missed more steps than he meant to, let himself slide on marble and fall into a doorjamb to stop, and hurtled his gangly body, that so preferred loping, that so preferred dancing, down the path as fast as it would go. And even so, he was almost too late.

Azkadellia was gagging, twitching her broken arms in strange stuttering, like a crow under a dog, and Ambrose just wasn't brutely strong enough in the arms to _pull_ Cain's hands from her throat. 

"Cain! Stop!" he hissed in his ear, but to no avail. He heard Cain mutter something like "your own good," though maybe it was " _her_ own good"--it was too much a blur to tell. 

In a panic, he hurled his body into Cain's to dislodge him from his task. But when Cain proved he'd recover more easily than that, Ambrose stumbled back up, closed his eyes, and spun out a kick until he heard a crack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _(Author's note: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!)_


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently no one's adjusted, anymore. Wounds are tended, plots are hatched, and bad habits die hard, but at least we're developing a "can do" attitude. Warnings: Medical ouch, questionable bedside manner, vegetable proteins, and rotgut that lives under the sink.

It all made sense, for a moment. The crack, the thud, the three sighs all in unison, and then the quiet.

It was so quiet!

Instinctual relief washed through Ambrose. The fighting was done, and the skirmish had somehow gone unnoticed inside--it must have, or there would be fussing and shouting, nosy onlookers, guards... Ambrose shuddered, after a wave of dizzy unbalance passed. Thank the gods there were no guards.

...Why were there no guards? 

Perhaps it wasn't so strange, he decided. Azkadellia's window hung over the lovely, pastoral, rolling field that stretched out to the cottage that the unimpeachable Tin Man and the well-tolerated Headcase shared, and the thick woods beyond; what attack could come from that side? At least, without a long advance notice? There wouldn't be many guards to speak of, posted at that edge of the palace. They had better places to be.

And though it felt like they had hung there inside that window for hours, that Azkadellia had fallen for days, that he had taken a year to arrive to help, that Cain had taken an eon to stop strangling her, it must have all happened so quickly; two, three minutes, at most. How long could it really take to fall fifteen feet and be set upon by an apparently deranged Tin Man, after all? And Ambrose knew he was fast; it wouldn't have taken him more than twenty or thirty seconds to arrive in time to crack his lover's skull and destroy his own life.

Cain. His whole life! He'd collapsed like a house of cards.

The guards would come soon. Someone would notice them, or check on Azkadellia and come up wanting. Someone would come, to snatch him up into irons and throw him back into a cell, for eternity... Unless someone killed him, of course; that could happen. They might think he'd been the one to kill the Princess (...had he been?), and treason is treason is treason is to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Ambrose didn't realize he was crying until his glitch hand was tickling at his cheeks, trying to bat the saline away.

Not _that_ again.

"Stop that," he hissed, but more at his eyes than anything else.

No one else was listening.

Ambrose turned away and clutched his arms around himself tightly, pinning the glitch hand under an elbow, and rocked back onto his heels. What had he done?

What should he do?

Confess? Run? Hide the bodies?

He fretted for a few endless minutes, but then finally, finally, there was sound. Behind him, the weak stirrings of tiny, indistinct groans and shuffles. And even through the haze of Ambrose's panic, it became clear very soon that the products of his murder weren't all that dead after all.

But they weren't at all well, either.

Azkadellia started to scream, but it was cut off before it could ring, and Ambrose spun to see Cain, one arm hanging very, very wrong, and the other hand planted over Azkadellia's mouth. He said, "We gotta' move. Now."

 

***

Ambrose didn't think. Thinking sometimes got in the way.

He just began.

Images filled the void this left. Machines so elegant that they were too simple to invent; the primordial machines, levers and inclines and axles and the rest. The Six First Machines, the DNA of all greater things! 

But other images came, too--ice along the palace in the frozen north, black lakes, the man who must have barely pulled himself up and out of the water before he passed out for good in the snow, half-drowned...

Ambrose had saved him, then. Or Glitch had, anyway. Dragging had been only half effective, and he'd gotten tired, and distracted, and lost his way, more than once. But now he was not in a wasteland; he had branches of trees, and coats, and belts, and two halves (albeit only occasionally communicative with one another) of a brain, instead of one. Struts and crossbars, taut slings, straps, blueprints...

And somehow, before he could really remember how he had ever carried one man so far before on his own, he had hauled up a makeshift stretcher behind him like a plough, its incline gentle and its leverage kind, and he was dragging two surly bodies away on it, half obscured under a blanket of the fallen fronds of very old trees.

***

Azkadellia spat threats and obscenities the entire way--now threatening them with death for treason, now begging to die--and it was all Cain could do to muffle her with his one good arm. He hated to ride, but his unfortunate collapse had twisted his knee on the way down, and it wouldn't hold him.

That ache was nothing, of course, next to the nauseating pain of his dislocated shoulder, the pulsing fire in the arm there that must, must be a break, the swelling greenish lump on the side of his head, the throb of his concussed skull. No, he hadn't even noticed his knee at all, until he'd tried to stand to help and fallen right back down.

But Ambrose had managed surprisingly well, on his own.

The trip felt like it took an age, but Cain watched the palace as hawkishly as he could, through the blurring in his vision, and no one ever emerged to follow them. They made it safely home, albeit in blinding pain from the jostling, and Ambrose had them tucked inside out of view in no time at all, with Cain propped up against one arm of the red sofa (the Recovery Couch, as Ambrose was starting to think of it), and Azkadellia flat on her back on the cushions, her legs slung over the arm of the couch and out of the way. (Her feet had cleared the cluttered end table in one. Cain didn't think anything important had broken, but couldn't seem to keep from glancing at the debris every so often.) 

Cain found himself impressed, in spite of himself, by the feat Ambrose had accomplished.

His first aid manner left something to be desired, however.

Ambrose understood the workings of the body, but it was purely theoretical, purely mechanical. He didn't think to at least get the wounded ones drunk, before his healing assault--something even Cain could have told him to do, if his head were clearer. He just bit his own coat while Ambrose knocked his shoulder back into joint, but it didn't do enough to dull the pain, and Azkadellia laughed bitterly at his strangled groan until the pain of her own ribs cut her off short.

When she had recovered enough to start to howl and shout, again, Ambrose gagged her with a plum and a long handkerchief, and it held for a while. At least he knew her lungs were intact; the wet sound in her breathing before had terrified him, and he was sure something important had been pierced, sure that she would die of it. Now her breathing was clear and distinct, and everything seemed surprisingly normal, relatively solid. The area was impossibly warm, though, almost glowing with heat.

But Ambrose didn't think about that for very long. He had too much to do.

He wrapped Cain's knee with what bandages they had, wrapped it well enough that he could stand guard over Azkadellia while Ambrose gathered or made more supplies. Cain couldn't have done much at his post, but neither could she, and it was enough that Ambrose could safely go dig for medical books in the flock of unorganized texts on his shelves in the bedroom. He brought back everything he could find, and settled onto the floor on his stomach like a child with his toys.

The gravity of the situation seemed to escape him entirely, for a while. He had a mission, new things to learn and new things to do, and the rest stopped mattering particularly.

In another hour, between cross-referencing and a little practical work, he had a better idea of where there were fractures, and he splinted Cain's arm before rigging him a sling out of an old shirt. It still hurt like hell, but Cain felt something like whole, again. Azkadellia's arms, on the other hand (and one of her legs), weren't going quite the right direction, but between the two men, they were able to set the bones close to straight, and fast.

She passed out with the last crack. Ambrose didn't blame her.

"Thank the gods," Cain muttered, but Ambrose just ungagged her and went back to carving a sheet into strips to bandage her ribs, and tie down her splints. He would get her back up in working order, and soon, be damned, or his name wasn't Ambrose Switch. 

It didn't even seem like all that much of a challenge, now, not if they were left alone long enough to get the thing done. But she really had seemed more hurt, before. He had been so sure that she would be dead, beyond hope...

A tiny gnawing started in him, felt like sand under his skin. 

Why was that a problem?

 

***

 

Cain was a problem. Once the worst of the crises were averted, and Azkadellia (again awake and asking for death) was strapped down to the cot ("For your own good"), he reverted to a quiet sullenness that Ambrose didn't know how to tend. He ate, but stubbornly, complaining of nausea and pain and the need for the flesh of dead animals, rather than the "perfectly nutritionally complete" mash of grain and legume that Ambrose had fashioned. He didn't respond to the nervous feathering touch of Ambrose's fingertips over his scalp, or half of what he said.

When he fell asleep on the bed in a sprawl, leaving little room to share, Ambrose paced, avoiding the glare of Azkadellia as best he could. He found a bottle of rotgut under the sink in the bathroom, and couldn't remember how it had gotten there, but he fed a little of it to her between spoonfuls of the mash, though she was nearly as difficult to get to eat as Cain. And though he was afraid to sit alone, he was glad when she fell into fitful sleep.

Cain's sleep was heavy and still as death. It hurt Ambrose to look at.

He washed himself like a bird, standing in the tub with a little cool water and a cloth, unwilling to become too indisposed, but when he shivering dried himself, and crept back to their room, they were still silent, and the strange peace of it was exhausting. He resolved to rest, too, and fetched pyjamas out of a drawer, but thought better of it--he might have to run for some help or supply--and picked out some plain dayclothes he thought wouldn't be too bad to sleep in. He tried to comb his wet hair, but gave up when his hands fought each other for the tangles. He tried to lie on the couch, but couldn't make himself go so far from his 'patients,' or trust Cain to wake up beside Azkadellia and not do something rash.

So he went back to the bedroom and sat down on the rag rug that they'd moved near the door (for those nights that Ambrose passed out there, scrabbling at the lock), and laid his head back against the wall, nearly tired enough to sleep that way. But not quite.

He closed the door, and pulled the rug across the threshold, curling up on top of it, but something was still wrong. And after lying there for a quarter of an hour denying his anxiety, he got back up and went over to Cain's still body to listen to him breathe, to lay his palm over Cain's heart and make sure it was still beating.

He closed his eyes and listened through his skin for a long time.

When Ambrose finally went to lift his hand away, again, he brushed over the small, flat shape lying under Cain's shirt, and frowned. Carefully, he slid the brass key out, and stared at the dim outline in his hand.

He wondered if he could find the lock in the dark.

Reaching delicately under Cain's neck to unclasp the chain, Ambrose decided he had to try. He crept over to the door and felt out the groove, fiddling as quietly as he could until he felt the solid, grave click through the frame.

He hadn't realized it was so quiet.

Ambrose waited only long enough to latch the windows, before putting put the key back where it belonged, clasping it under Cain's neck like it had never left, like Cain had been the one to lock up. And after the softest kiss he could manage, to Cain's forehead, he curled back up on the floor to wait out the long night. He slept fitfully, but didn't dream.

 

***

 

In the morning, hateful of the sunlight and throbbing with ache in places he hadn't known could throb that way, Cain tried to decide where he was, what had happened, and who to blame.

He came up mostly empty.

He remembered fairly quickly that his knee and his arm were close to out of commission, because they fought him before he could even get out of bed. And when he almost tripped over Ambrose in the doorway, kicking him awake in the process, he got the faintest shadow of ill will, of feeling betrayed. So while he apologized, and let Ambrose get up and get the door for him, he was wary.

While Ambrose fussed over his splint and bandages, and touched the spot on his skull that must be the source of the impossible pain radiating in spikes through his ears and eyes, Cain scraped for any evidence of the cause of his pain, but all he could come up with was _Ambrose._

Finally, disoriented and guilty for his suspicion, he asked, "Did you do this?" expecting to hear an indignant refutation.

"Oh, Cain... Gods, you don't--no, of course you don't, concussion," he mumbled, and shook his head. "A patient suffering from a concussion rarely remembers the actual trauma that causes the damage," Ambrose said, like he was quoting from a book. Maybe he was. "Partial or complete amnesia for the event is a common occurrence, sometimes accompanied by additional memory loss for a period before or after the event..."

"Ambrose..." Cain asked as evenly as he could, "what happened?"

Ambrose became very interested in preparing tea, then, stuffing wood into the stove. "It--I--I sort of... might have... kicked you, while you were bent low. And caught your shoulder and your head in the swing. And by 'caught,' I mean struck very hard, with the effect of fracturing your arm, dislocating your shoulder, and concussing you. When you fell, you twisted your knee, too," he added, almost eagerly. That one wasn't his fault directly, at least.

Cain watched him carefully.

"So," he verified, "you _did_ do this."

Ambrose worried at the matches so much that Cain was afraid he'd burn himself, but finally nodded, not looking up.

"Why?"

Ambrose's head shot up, then, and there was an awful, foreboding moment of silence, while he stared.

Cain braced.

"To... Cain, I... To stop you from committing a murder."

 

***

Over the morning, much of the previous day slid into place, slow and reluctant as mud to move, but Cain struggled to make room for it, for the strange company and his own strange part in it.

Ambrose fed him while he recounted scattered parts of the day that Cain was still missing, or hadn't seen. He couldn't say too much about what had happened, but the revelation that the Princess had asked him in to help kill her comforted something in Cain's soul, a little. He wondered what was wrong with him that suicide felt better than seduction.

But when he asked whether Ambrose had done it, whether he'd pushed her, Ambrose couldn't seem to pin down a response.

Cain thought that that should have been an easy question to answer.

He pushed his alarm down and away as best he could. "Suppose it doesn't matter," he lied, around a mouthful of breakfast, hoping for an admission one way or another, "since she would have probably done it on her own..." but the effect was not what he'd hoped.

"I don't know," Ambrose said, still frustratingly noncommittal. "Maybe she was just baiting me." He picked disinterestedly at clumps of his own granola. "But she did keep asking us to, after she fell." He lowered his voice, conspiratorially, and said, "I think she thinks we brought her back here to euthanize her."

Cain's eyes shot up, and over to the bedroom, where the door was only mostly shut.

"Did we?"

Maybe he should have taken it for granted that Ambrose didn't mean to. Cain tried to regret asking, but if Ambrose couldn't decide whether he'd even pushed her out of a window, or not...

After an endless pause, Ambrose shook his head. "No. I wanted to fix her. I couldn't give her to the medics, they'd ask..." His voice trailed off, as he let his fingers drift through his food.

"S'pose they would," Cain agreed. His voice sounded hollow, even in his own ears, and he coughed to cover it. "They might not be so ready to trust she was suicidal. Might think you just snapped." _I snapped,_ Cain added, silently.

"So we have to keep her," Ambrose said, practically. "Until she's better, at least, and over this little... self-destructive binge."

"Right," Cain said, uneasily. He couldn't see a way around it, but he wondered if that was the fog of the concussion, and if he wouldn't think better of it in a few days.

Still, how much could it hurt to keep her for a few days?


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently no one's adjusted, anymore. But wounds are tended, souls are nursed, and treason is treason is treason. This chapter contains questions, manipulations, remembering, forgetting, forgiving, not forgiving, and a certain amount of screaming. Warnings: An OC, a question and answer period, a hairbrush, and a sponge bath. And a cliff-hanger, but you're probably used to that, by now.

"Do you remember baths at my palace?" Azkadellia whispered to Ambrose, as he worked to undress her with shaking hands. 

Cain had elected to stay in the room, for her bath (such as it was), but wondered if he'd made the wrong choice.

Ambrose didn't answer her. "Hand me the bowl, please," he mumbled, and Cain reached to do it with his good hand.

"Oh, come now, Ambrose," she said softly, sweetly, "if you're going to keep me locked up, away from my family and away from my life, at least speak to me..."

Ambrose closed his eyes tightly, and the set of his jaw told Cain (even through the lingering mugginess of his skull) that he was fighting off tears. The glitch hand was fumbling for the washcloth in the soapy water, as if determined to go on, with or without him.

"Please, old friend..." Azkadellia twitched her fingers, as if she would move to touch him but didn't quiet have the strength. "You can't blame me for the things we did to you..."

"Hush," Ambrose guttered. "I don't know."

Cain looked between them slowly. He didn't know _what_? Didn't know if he could blame her...?

Azkadellia pouted, then, but the gesture was strangely false, and her eyes were cool. Pins pricked the back of Cain's neck, to see this, and tripped down his spine.

They were all silent, for a moment.

Ambrose finally gathered himself enough to start washing Azkadellia's body, and she sighed audibly as he began. She'd resisted and resisted being bathed (and eating, and having her splints checked, her surface wounds cleaned, her breathing listened to...), but when three days had passed, she'd acquiesced, bitter and weak. A strange stillness came over her, as Ambrose worked, and she was very quiet through the too-intimate task.

For his part, Ambrose was keeping up a detached distance and a kind of resentful thoroughness. At first. But as he shifted the blanket he'd laid over her, now to expose, now to cover, a softness came about his work, and a shyness, and the grace of familiarity and muscle memory.

Cain felt oddly like he was trespassing, and looked away. His throat felt constricted, or thick. It was a little hard to breathe, in the dim little room.

Azkadellia laughed very softly, once, and Cain looked up, but Ambrose had already withdrawn from wherever he had been, dropping the cloth nervously and reaching for the towel. He dried her cautiously, like he was afraid she would break (which she might), or bite.

"Brush my hair," she asked, all humility, when Ambrose had finished and covered her with the blanket, but Cain couldn't tell if it was false or not. Just looking at her was disorienting (though that might just as well have been the remnants of the concussion). And though he'd hated her, before, for whatever she might or might not have done with Ambrose in the early Spring, and in the Winter and in the Summer before, he hadn't felt so wary of her, hadn't wondered if she was any worse than just the broken figure he'd been told she'd become, with the petty hurts and allowances that entailed and perhaps forgave.

He did wonder now, just a little. He had a vacuum of suspicion to fill, now that... well. Now that he couldn't hold every hurt in his heart against Ambrose, for a while.

Cain had been strangely sobered, by the false inebriation of his injuries, and the world seemed under a cold new light, like a grey morning after a snow. He remembered why he had trusted Ambrose so little, but only in a clinical way. His trigger to action--his belief that Ambrose and Azkadellia had been entwined, just on the other side of the door from him--had been nothing, in the end, and all the assumed trespasses of before seemed petty and thin, next to their joint attempt at murder afterwards. If that was what it was. 

Cain knew he had been trying to kill her, at least, if he knew nothing else.

Ambrose, even if he'd had some torrid affair with the Princess in the woods, even if he'd seen her a dozen times, even if he'd lied to Cain outright, seemed blameless in the face of that.

And the victim, strangely enough, did not.

Cain felt like a dog before a storm, ill at ease of her, and not just from the rational terror of being caught holding a royal. There was something _wrong_ with her, and the animal in man cannot abide a wrongness, even if he is stupid or superstitious or mean, for it. The hindbrain resists, pulls away or blots out. 

That didn't excuse his mad attempt to destroy her. But it did give him cause to wonder.

Ambrose sighed, shakily enough to pull Cain from his fearful reverie. He'd fetched the brush, and was rearranging Azkadellia as much as he needed, to free her hair from beneath her. They'd pulled the pins out of it, the day before, but the tangles had taken long before then, and the strange coils lingered, ghosts of good grooming.

"Watch me," he whispered in a plea, to Cain, "make sure I don't..." With much force of will, he indicated with the glitch hand. "...do anything," he finished lamely.

Cain nodded his promise he would, and Ambrose set uneasily to his task.

His fingers trembled while he worked (they had hardly stopped trembling, since they'd gotten her in), but if he pulled, Azkadellia made no sign of it, only closed her eyes as if soothed. And as he undid the knots and flattened the forced coils, she looked like she was melting into the cot, her inky hair fanning out around her like a nymph underwater, dissolving into a shadow.

About halfway through, she asked, sing-song and sighing, "Do you remember when I washed your hair for you?"

When Ambrose blinked, there were already tears formed and falling, landing quietly on the blanket below. He swallowed, and after a moment murmured thickly, "Yes."

Azkadellia smiled faintly, sadly. "You loved me a little bit, then, didn't you?"

Ambrose hitched a breath and brought his forearm up to his face, swiping at his eyes urgently. "Az, please..."

"You did," she whispered, "you told me. You hated me, too, but you loved me..."

Cain hobbled up to his feet, as Ambrose's shoulders started to shake in earnest and a panicked hiccough took his breath. He reached to take the brush away, and gathered his lover under his arm, half shepherding him, half making a crutch of him to get out of the room. "Come on. Finish it later."

He felt sick. But he guessed Ambrose felt sicker, so he bit it back, and guided him out to the sofa to fall into the upholstery and clutch him close while he sobbed.

 

********

 

Cain was thrust headlong back into the role of the sane one, the sober one, the protector, and he wasn't sure he was ready for it. Not sure at all.

Ambrose was pacing, agitated, outside the bedroom door, while Cain leaned on an improvised crutch to block his path. "Ambrose," he said, as sternly as he could, "go sit down and drink your tea."

"Please!" Azkadellia wailed, from the other side of the door, "please, mercy..."

Ambrose's knuckles were raw from his biting. Sniffing, he clutched his fists to his face, like he was afraid it would break open if he didn't brace it, didn't hold it. "I can't--she won't--"

"She'll calm down," Cain said, "she always does. This isn't gonna' kill her, and she can't honestly believe it is, so all the rest of this is just hysterics."

She was pleading for death, again. This had been the pattern; a few hours would pass quietly, and then she would snap. Nothing at all seemed to have set her off, this time; one minute Ambrose was finishing brushing her hair, and then she was begging, screaming. They'd strapped her down and tried to quiet her, but Ambrose hadn't been a match for it.

"But she's--I can't stand it," he said, shuddering, "I can't--"

"So go out, get out of here for a little while. Go pick up a game bird from the kitchens, listen and see if--see what anyone is saying. It's been awful quiet, yet, there's got to be something in the works."

"I shouldn't--"

"Ambrose," Cain said, firmly, "get."

Ambrose kissed him and fled.

 

***

 

Something was in the works. There was a definite buzz about the palace, with all of the curious whispering and conspiracy hashing that entailed. Ambrose ducked about his business quietly, but the crawling dread crept up on him too late.

Why hadn't it occurred to him he could get swept up in that?

"No, no, no," Ambrose pleaded silently, trying to shrink into nothing behind a cupboard, when he heard running footsteps. "Please don't see me, please--"

"Ambrose!" DG yelled, dashing through the door and to him, gripping his arm. He nearly dropped his sack. "There you are! Come on, Mom was just about to send someone out to get you, she says she needs you to talk to someone. I said you didn't know anything, but she said you might have maybe seen something when you were here, so..." She trailed off, but he was still being dragged off from the kitchen with no recourse. No unsuspicious recourse, anyway. If he bolted, he'd surely be chased.

"Az has been missing," DG hissed, conspiratorially, "longer than usual. Nobody's seen her in four days, and usually she's just, you know, locked up in her room, but they finally busted in this morning, and they don't think she's been in there for a while. And, I mean, she's disappeared before, but usually not for very long, and she always comes back on her own, you know, eventually..."

Ambrose's terrified brain tried to absorb all of this information, tried to formulate something--anything--to say, tried to order and shape all of the pieces into tools he could build with. He felt too frantic to go forward.

DG had more than enough momentum for the two of them, however.

"Anyway, this will just take a minute, you just have to talk to the investigator, and tell him you haven't seen her, so they can get on with it. It's so lucky you dropping in, right now! How've you been?" she asked, warm with concern. "How's Cain?"

Ambrose gaped for longer than he should have, but thought he remembered something about how lies that are closest to the truth are the best. "He's--he hurt himself," he stammered, "Fell. It's--it's been keeping us stuck indoors, lately, he's not walking so well."

"Oh, God, Glitch, I'm sorry, you know we could send over a healer, get him back up and running in no time... Or even Raw and I could come, I'm getting pretty good at bending my magic into healing, and you know Raw's good..."

Raw was also a little too good at seeing into people's souls.

"No," Ambrose said, too fast, and then scraped for a reason, "no... Cain's..." He shook his head, slowly, and took a sharp breath when he thought of it. "You know how proud he is, he's really embarrassed about it, it was--it was a really silly fall, he'd be upset I even told you. He's just going to lay up and, and be stubborn for a while, then he'll be fine..."

DG squeezed his arm, and smiled a little. "Oh, all _right._ I'm dying to try it out, though. It's like--something's been _pushing_ me, or, or pulling me, maybe. I think I somehow knew Cain was hurt, maybe, I've felt like... like there's someone I love who needs healing. God, Ambrose, I hope that's all it is, just Cain's leg or whatever it is... You don't think..." DG's voice started to quaver, a little. "You don't think I'm feeling it because of... not Az..."

Ambrose shook his head, though the wave of terror threatened to sweep him under. And a wave of tears, to match DG's unshed ones. "N-no, she's really... really resilient, right? Nothing could hurt her." He squeezed her arm desperately, his glitch hand clenching and unclenching a fist in the space between them. "I'm sure she's okay."

"Thank you, Glitch." She stopped dragging him, then, and leaned to kiss his cheek. "You're so sweet. Take care of Cain, for me, promise? I just got a... a bad vibe, so make sure he didn't, like, fall again, okay?"

"Okay," Ambrose whispered, ashen. 

"Okay," she said, nodding, and hugged him, before spinning him around. "Here you go, he's in there. You'll be fine!"

And just like that, Ambrose found himself nudged over a threshold, and right into the hard face of the law.

 

***

The man behind the table was unfamiliar, and Ambrose didn't recognize (or didn't remember) him, though time could have turned anything into the man in front of him. He was indistinct and worn, like an old coat, grown leathery and faded and bare of ornamentation, over time, a grey coat and white hair and brittle fingernails with nothing much in between.

Ambrose desperately wanted the man to be calm, and gentle, and kind. He looked like an old advisor ought to, or like a grandfather on a farm, stately and soft. He might be kind.

"I understand that the Princess Dorothy Gale intended to inform you that this is merely a formality, but I urge you to disregard her statement." The man hardly looked up from the notes he was scrawling into his neat, open folder, as he spoke, and his voice was low and grave and hard and even. 

Ambrose felt dizzy. The door swung shut, behind him, and latched.

"I'm Acting Investigator Bernhaben," the man continued, "and I'll be collecting your statement and pursuing more information with you if necessary. Have a seat, Mister Switch."

"Ambrose, please," he said, nervously, "no one--nobody even--"

"Mister Ambrose," Bernhaben said, more slowly, "have a seat," and his gravity left no room for refusal.

Ambrose swallowed, and sat, like it was automatic. He felt nauseated and weak, and he knew he was sweating. Gods, he'd have known he was lying before he even spoke, if he'd been Acting Investigator and talking to him...self. He tried to take a few deep breaths to calm himself. "Sorry, but I hope this won't be long, my l--my... my person is stuck at home, waiting for me, and he's hurt right now. I need to bring back food," he said, gripping his sack, "we're just about out and it got completely away from me, you know how it can be when someone's sick at home... Or, well, not sick, but you know how it is, laid up..."

Bernhaben didn't spare him a glance for this, just made a note. "Mister Ambrose, I have been given reason by Her Majesty the Queen to believe that you are the last person known to have seen the Princess Azkadellia, as you were sent to her quarters unaccompanied shortly after the last time Her Majesty the Queen had contact with her. You left at an unspecified time, and have not returned since."

There was a pause, and Ambrose shifted uncomfortably. Was that a question? "I went to visit, but--"

"Did you enter the Princess Azkadellia's quarters unaccompanied, as instructed by Her Majesty the Queen, upon your last visit to the Palace?" Bernhaben's eyes came up, then, for the first time. They looked fathomless, and as pale as winter.

Ambrose felt cold.

"Yes," he said, and his voice was a wisp, "I did, but--"

"And was she there, inside, when you arrived?"

"Yes--"

"And how long did you stay inside of the Princess Azkadellia's quarters?"

"I really don't know, I--"

"Please make an estimate," Bernhaben said, calmly. 

Ambrose was rattled. The man interrupted the way a mountain did by being in front of you; there was nothing sudden about it, it just was impassable.

"I--" Ambrose shook his head, trying to think. His glitch hand caught hold of a lock of his hair and pulled. "I'm not sure, maybe... maybe a half an hour?" Something about this man was unsettling, even beyond his task; he was as unmoving as the sky, as grave as the earth. Ambrose didn't know how to not move, anymore. How did you talk to someone like that?

"And then you left, taking approximately the same route by which you entered?"

"Yes, sir..."

"Was the Princess Azkadellia still in her quarters, when you left them?"

"No, she--I mean, yes, but she--" Ambrose could have strangled himself, if he'd had the leverage.

"Pardon," Bernhaben said, but it wasn't a question so much as an irrefusable demand. "Did you leave her quarters alone?"

"Yes," Ambrose said, trying to keep track of everything he'd already said and threatening to lose the thread quickly. He felt so scattered...

"And was the Princess Azkadellia inside them when you left?"

"Yes," he said again, this time nodding and lying as firmly as he could.

"Please enlighten me as to why your first answer to that question was 'No,'" Bernhaben said, perfectly unfazed.

"I--I saw her leave," Ambrose said, basically truthfully. "I didn't--"

"When?"

"When?" Ambrose repeated, startled.

"When did you see the Princess Azkadellia leave her quarters?" Bernhaben clarified.

"The same--well, almost the same time as I did. Not--not with me, but I--I saw her outside, when I was outside, and--and so I knew she'd left the palace."

Ambrose was half pleased with himself: that hadn't been a lie. He breathed a little easier, before realizing that probably didn't make him look any better. He tried to settle back into "concerned/flustered." It wasn't very hard.

Bernhaben glanced up at him, briefly, before returning his eyes to his notes. "Where was the Princess Azkadellia when you saw her, outside of the palace?"

"I don't..." Ambrose began, but thought better of denying completely. Better to give them something... He almost said "under her window," just to be telling the truth, but his brain caught up with him, and reminded him there would be grooves from the stretcher through the dirt, there, and while they might be lost in the long field, they'd still suggest a direction. After a terrifying moment, he shook his head, finally defaulting to the first answer. "I don't know. I don't remember."

"You cannot remember?" Bernhaben pressed, sounding as unconvinced as his steady tone allowed.

"I'm--" Ambrose set his jaw. "No, I can't. I forget things." And though it hadn't happened, in this case, he let his very real feelings about the thing up. The moody, bubbling thing in his stomach twinged an angry circuit alive, and he felt his scalp tingling, his skull starting to ease apart, just slowly. When he glanced aside, he could tell his glitch hand had taken the initiative, and was unzipping his head.

"You may not have noticed, Acting Investigator Bernhaben," Ambrose said, taking up Bernhaben's impossible formality as sternly as he was able, "but I'm a rehabilitating headcase. I have two lobes, again," and they were now visible, "but the cerebral cortex can never really be fully repaired, and it causes a certain amount of 'glitching,' to borrow the term that the Princess Azkadellia coined after she had it done."

"Perhaps you have unresolved feelings concerning your treatment at the hands of the Witch Acting Through the Princess Azkadellia," Bernhaben suggested, looking up from his notes. His eyebrows had pricked just slightly.

Ambrose's righteous anger went cold. "Yes," he said, quietly, and tried to will his hand to zip him back up. "But we have a certain--bond, I suppose, and the Queen asked me to help, if I could. Azkadellia hasn't been doing so well, apparently." He looked at the table, unable to meet the unblinking gaze. "I don't think I did any good."

"Where was the Princess Azkadellia when you saw her outside of her quarters?" Bernhaben asked again, slightly slower, as if there had been no diversion, as if Ambrose only needed to be prompted like a nervous child.

Ambrose shook his head. "I don't remember," he lied, closing his eyes tightly.

"Can you reconstruct where she might have been from where you were, at the time?" Bernhaben persisted.

"No," he refused flatly.

Bernhaben circled back around, verbally. "Where were you at the time that you saw the Princess Azkadellia outside of her quarters?"

"At the--" The glitch hand started weaving blindly. "I don't know where I am. The exit that faces out over the field toward the cottage, I was heading home."

"She was visible from the exit, or very near to it," Bernhaben confirmed.

"Yes..." They'd be able to come up with an angle, from there, but at least it wouldn't contain the actual place. That was good, Ambrose thought.

"Did you see her again, after that?"

"N-no," Ambrose said. "I'm not sure where she went."

"Have you had any contact with the Princess Azkadellia outside of the palace, since you came to live on the grounds?"

Ambrose took longer than he should have, answering that. Would someone know about that? Could someone have seen?

"A little," he said, finally, noncommittal.

"How recently?"

"I don't remember," Ambrose said, this time very truthfully. "It's been a while. I've spent all my time with Cain--with Wyatt Cain--for a long time, now. I don't know how long. And we haven't seen her together, ever."

Bernhaben ticked a check by something on his page. "Where did you meet her?"

"I don't... somewhere in the woods," he said, vaguely. He was sure he'd gone green, now.

"Anywhere else?"

"No," Ambrose said, shaking his head. "Always in the woods."

"Would you say that she frequented the woods, when she left the palace?"

"I wouldn't know what she frequented," Ambrose said, stiffly. "I only saw her there."

Bernhaben leaned closer to his notes, poring. 

After more than a minute in silence, he nodded slightly. "Thank you."

"Thank--what?"

"That is the extent of my questioning, for now."

"Can I--I can go?" Ambrose asked, collecting his sack into his lap, and starting to rise.

"Are you going back to Cottage-at-the-Field?" Bernahben asked.

Ambrose blinked. "Is that what it's called?"

"Yes."

"Then, yes," he said, nodding, his spirits soaring. The bullet was dodged, even if just temporarily. "Yes, I'm going home." He might even skip, on the way.

Bernhaben nodded. "Then I will accompany you."

Ambrose blanched, and fell back into his seat. "Why?"

"You have indicated Mister Cain in your answers to my questions, which requires me to speak with him to verify your answers." He folded his hands together over his notes; his first particularly human gesture. 

Ambrose shivered a little. "What--why? It's just about--why is that even important?"

Bernhaben continued without answering. "I also have jurisdiction to search all premises on the palace grounds as are indicated in my questioning."

Ambrose shook his head, weakly. "When did I indicate them?"

"When you suggested that Mister Cain is..." He paused to consult the notes. "'Stuck' there. Again when you answered in the affirmative concerning your destination. Furthermore, you remain the last person known to have had contact with her, which suggests import to observing your residence."

Ambrose swallowed, as his heart raced violently, and consulted a mental list.

Could he outrun the Investigator?

Almost certainly. 

Could he outrun a guard the Investigator could send after him?

Probably. 

Could he outrun a guard and remove Azkadellia far enough from home that he wouldn't get caught at it by said guard?

Not a chance.

He cursed inwardly, and nodded, rising in a daze of panic. "Yes. All right."

What else could he do?

Bernhaben closed his folder, rising to follow him around the desk. When they'd crossed and exited the little room, Bernhaben gestured for two guards in the hall to follow; Ambrose didn't know if they were Bernhaben's escort or his own. He experimented with walking ahead, to see whom they'd keep pace with. They split the difference.

He clutched his sack up and to his chest, and tried not to shudder too visibly, while he walked, faster still, but only by habit. Frantically, he scraped for possibilities.

What would they see when they came in? Cain on guard, and a closed door with Azkadellia behind it. What options did that give him?

He couldn't implicate Cain. Oh, it would be the easiest thing--'Cain, what's she doing here?'--but it wasn't an option. Maybe 'Oh, Cain, where did you find her? Thank the gods, she's been missing apparently!' That would buy them a few minutes, at least. Maybe they could say she was half-mad, didn't seem to know what she was saying... The way she'd been shouting, when he left, it was likely she'd fit the part.

At least he couldn't hear her, now. That bought him a little more time still, didn't it?

The guards might follow him around back, if he led them there, and he could take them out without much difficulty, and the Investigator. The problem would be if one of them ran away, rather than stayed to fight; he could warn others, and they'd have all the resources of the palace instantly on them. Probably not a good idea. Even if he caught them all, he'd be stuck hiding a Princess, an Acting Investigator, and two guards.

He could say, 'Yes, I lied to you just now, but I swear I found her like this in the woods, I just panicked when you asked.' Oh, no, not suspicious at all. Especially not when she would say, after, 'Found me, ha! Kill them both for treason!'

He could come clean. Ha.

He was going to die. He was going to be caught out, tried, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and then he was going to be killed. He was walking the plank, marching to his death on his own power, and he would be taking Cain down with him.

He started to cry, again, unable to stop.

He wanted to fall into Cain's arms and just be held and weep. If they were thrown into prison to await trial, would they at least be together? Could he cry on Cain then? Or would they be held separate, tried separate, and die alone?

Ambrose didn't bother to cover his weeping. No one asked him about it.

He didn't want to die.

There might, just might be a little hope for the 'Oh-where-did-you-find-her' route, if Cain was in perfect form and caught on right away. If the concussion allowed it. Or at least forgave him being led. It was worth a try, worth the shot at avoiding... well. They'd bandaged her wounds--Cain could say he'd done it, that she'd even stumbled to their door on her own, that he hadn't had to carry her (since he'd be hard pressed to pass as able to). Maybe...

The hope was weak, a tiny light threatening to snuff out completely in the saltwater.

Never before had the sight of the perfect little door seemed so hateful, so cruel. This was refuge, even when it was sometimes also his prison. This was the safe place, in the world.

'Please don't scream, please don't scream, please don't...' he begged, silently, when he approached the door.

He could barely make himself reach for it. He could barely fight down a sob.

He rapped hard, three times, deliberate and distinct. "Cain!" he yelled, unable to even pray for a miracle, "Are you decent?" A little warning was as much as he could give. He had to give him that chance... Maybe he'd be able to sneak out, or play completely out of commission, and Ambrose could take the blame alone, without dragging his lover down with him...

He gripped the handle, and turned it, slow. "We have guests--an investigator from the palace and two guards--" he tried, "are you--are you fit for company?"

There was no response.

Well, he wouldn't have known what to say or do, either, he supposed. He closed his eyes.

And feeling like he was cutting through his own throat, Ambrose gave the door a gentle push, and let it swing open.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a lucky break, "instinct," prevarication, hints, confirmations, relief, terror, nausea, realizations of betrayals, derailment, and some persons curiously absent. Warnings: Lying to the police (gasp!), caginess, nosebleed, and delayed resolution.

Ambrose stood still in the center of the room, silent and numb, while the investigator and his escorts wove around him in incomprehensible cycles. He listened to the soft creak of the floorboard beneath his left heel, when he shifted his foot. He promised to write himself a note about it fixing it. He promised to learn how.

The men circled and narrowed, circled and widened, making notes, marking the blood. They asked few questions. But one they asked, and again, was: "Where is he?"

Ambrose had a hard time with that one. 

Where _was_ he?

And where was _she_?

He had opened the door into a cottage that was deserted and dim, the only movement the dust motes, sinking through the slits of light around the curtains. He'd tried calling again, made a show of knocking softly on the bedroom door and peeking in, as if afraid his mate was sleeping. He'd found the little room empty, and the bathroom, too, and there was nowhere else to be.

He'd gone into a kind of shock, then, of relief and terror, and had become useless to Bernhaben and his escort. He'd drifted out of the way and settled, uneven, one foot on the rag rug and one on the protesting plank.

_Where are they?_

_Where could they be?_

"Nothing outside, sir, no sign of him."

Ambrose felt like he might dissolve. He lurched past the man, out of the cottage, around to the wood pile. He touched a piece of black, rotting wood, touched the long handle of the shovel, and stayed there a long time, as if he could draw knowledge from them like a medium.

And in a way, he did.

"Chopping wood," he said, suddenly.

"Pardon," Bernhaben said, emerging and striding over to him. "Please repeat yourself."

"Chopping wood," Ambrose repeated, automatically. Bernhaben's manner was starting to seep in through the edges, like his very presence could square off corners and order the world around him. It was strangely calming. "The axe is gone. The wheelbarrow is gone. He must be chopping wood."

Bernhaben spent a moment with that, like chewing. When he found the off taste, he said, "There is plenty of wood here."

"He was getting stir-crazy and needed air, it would have given him something to do." The words came out before Ambrose could even realize he'd thought them up. "I'm sure that must be it."

Another objection: "He was 'stuck;' he couldn't walk."

"I made him a crutch," Ambrose returned, just as cleanly. He felt all at once like he was soaring. "He could support himself on the wheelbarrow, too."

"It would be very awkward work with a bad leg."

"He is a very stubborn man."

Bernhaben stared at him, measuring, quiet. Ambrose could tell he was circling around the thing and feeling out the soft spots, but finally nodded briskly, just the same. "You will tell him we called," Bernhaben informed him. It was not a request.

"Of course."

"And that I will arrange to come see him again."

"I'll even hobble him over to the palace, myself," Ambrose promised, folding his arms, "if he's so keen to be out. I told him specifically to stay in bed and not be up and about on that knee," he continued, as if to himself. "But you know Tin Men, stubborn and all-knowing. Well, he can just get up again and go sit through a little 'interview' like I did, if he's so tired of being cooped up," he went on, trailing into a bitter mumble. Or at least a very convincing mimic of one.

"Indeed," Bernhaben said, a little quickly, stopping Ambrose from rambling any further. "Bring him tomorrow at midday, or I'll return for him," he said, made a clean turn, and gathered his detail to go.

Ambrose stayed by the woodpile, trembling with a kind of excitement and shock, as he watched their retreat.

What had just happened?

And had it really worked? Had instinct--or a brain moving so fast it felt like instinct, anyway--really carried him through?

A tiny part of him felt triumphant, remembering the days long before when his hands had moved faster than his consciousness as he drafted, built, calculated, cresting on a perfect wave of synaptic rhythm. When every part of his brain had fired off so fast that he felt like he was flying, so perfectly that it didn't even feel like thinking, nothing so base and slow as reading a thought. He'd felt so _calm,_ then, at least if you could be calm and perpetually excited and in action at the same time. 

Maybe he'd just been unpanicked, then. It seemed the same thing, now. A veneer of panic had covered his world for so long he wasn't sure he'd be able to tell the difference, anymore.

He indulged a flare of giddiness, and spun a drunken circle, the glitch hand scooping up the shovel handle as it passed. When he stopped, it swung it a little, like a pendulum in a clock.

When it stopped and slackened, the shovel's momentum carried it forward, landing point first like an arrow in a groove the wheelbarrow had left in the grass.

And Ambrose suddenly felt very cold, all the glare of giddiness evaporating in the stark chill.

"You're right," he said, reaching and freeing the shovel from the earth, tipping it back over his shoulder like a pikeman's spear. This was no time for petty cleverness, now.

Cain had taken the wheelbarrow, the axe, and Azkadellia, and had headed for the woods, and Ambrose didn't know why.

And when he thought he could guess, he went into a sprint.

 

***

 

Ambrose let momentum take him where it would, since it had worked so well, so far, this morning. But a treeless root where there should have been a tree caught him up unexpected and bowled him over onto his face, into the dirt and scrub and brush.

He groaned and tasted blood on his lip.

He let his head fall aside, panting for air, to look up at what had stopped him; looked at the absence of it.

And then he threw up and passed out, more or less at the same time.

 

***

 

Ambrose woke up. The burning in the delicate tissues of his nose had spread through his face, into his eyes; he decided it wasn't broken, but it was certainly swollen, and now his eyes were watering, and in any second it was going to feel like hay fever, and--

He sneezed, pushing himself off of the ground, and fishing for a handkerchief to wipe his chin, blow his nose.

His eyes didn't really stop watering, even when the thing was done.

So he backed up wearily, still crouched, until he came up against another trunk, and stared at the low, rotted stump of the tree he'd so often found himself in or under, of a morning, with no recollection of how he'd gotten there.

That occasionally he'd even gotten up and gone to outright, waking and lucid, even when he wasn't sure why he was doing it.

That he'd even lied about going to, once or twice. (A little flicker of guilt flared up around the memory of notes left for Cain to wake up to, notes with promises that he was only gone picking berries and would return.)

Ambrose was not proud of those little trespasses. He was not proud of grander ones, either. He hated that terrible, ugly tree, and everything that surrounded it.

So he wasn't exactly sure why he was so upset to see it gone. And he wasn't at all sure why he wasn't more upset than he was, either. 

It was a kind of low grade anguish he was swaddled in, like being ill as a child; there was confusion, discomfort, misery and ache, a complete lack of understanding coupled with a vague sense of betrayal, and a contrary need to be left alone and comforted at once.

Maybe it was cats that did that, instead of children. He couldn't really remember. He wished he had a blanket, though, a cup of something hot and someone to stroke his hair.

But he didn't, at the same time. He could see the splintered, sharp angles in the stump of his slain tree, the marks of the axe in it. And the memory of the woodpile, of the blackened rot there, came over him like nausea; Cain had done this, undeniably, and he had done it a long time before. Long enough that he couldn't even remember exactly how long ago it had been.

Not that he could rely on himself to remember exactly anything.

But no matter when it had been, Ambrose knew now that Cain had chopped down his tree. Their tree. 

It came out _'our tree,'_ in his head.

But the "our" brought him up almost as short as the tree root had, and the obliteration. The prospect of having an "our" with Azkadellia made him feel colder still, filled him with a strange trembling of old fears and new ones and sick nauseous betrayal.

"Oh, gods..." he sighed, through the shaking, lost.

Did Cain know...?

Could Cain know more about it than Ambrose did?

And where was he? Where had they gone?

A tiny paranoid part of him supplied a terrible scenario, and he crawled on hands and knees forward, to peer at the shell of a trunk, at the few places there was much a solid core to speak of at all. At the places an invalid could be laid, while another invalid put himself to a task. He looked at it forensically, as if he already knew it was a sacrificial slab, trying to find signs of new axe marks, of blood, of threads or hair or anything out of place, but there was nothing.

He shook a faint sigh of relief that at least Cain hadn't brought Azkadellia here to chop her into pieces, like some mad woodsman. He laughed at himself, a little; hadn't that fear been why he'd come this way, before he tripped and scattered and lost all of his momentum? To be sure of that little fact, that he shouldn't have had to worry about at all?

In a better world--or in a better life--he wouldn't have to have worried.

Ambrose crumpled, a little, and forgot his urgency, again.

Sick at Cain, and sick at himself, Ambrose turned his back on the remains of the trunk and leaned his back against it, laid his forehead on his knees and wrapped his arms around them. He stayed there and he cried until the sun left and the air chilled and the twilight made everything strange and dim.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains medical danger, backalley dealings, vague giddiness, a wheelbarrow, crpytic sniping, and bookends. Warnings: Obfuscation of identities, delayed resolution, surgery, and a kilt. And excessive Cain POV.

"Will you quiet down?" Cain snapped low. "'Can't hardly think as it is."

Azkadellia choked off her wheezing moan, if barely. " _Hurry,_ Mr. Cain," she hissed urgently.

"I'm hurrying," he growled.

And he was. Cain was moving the wheelbarrow and its dangerously unhappy contents through the edge of the woods, toward the outskirts of the little town on the other side, as fast as his bum knee could carry him. It was just not entirely clear to him where he was hurrying _to._

Cain and Ambrose had spent their share of time roaming the town beyond the bridge, taking in the shops and drinking in the bar and even occasionally just making civil with their second-nearest neighbors, but he'd been too out of practice as they had done; the catalogue of suspicious fronts, useful people, and backalleys that he had automatically mapped onto cities since longer ago than he could recall--that he'd mapped even onto little boroughs like this--was incomplete, here, imperfect. And if he'd been pressed to tell the truth, he'd have to admit he just hadn't cared enough, at the time.

He'd had Ambrose to worry over. Anything but the necessary observations to keep him safe in the immediate had fallen by the wayside.

He felt a fool, and shortsighted. _This_ would have kept Ambrose safe. He'd gotten lazy; he knew where to find food, healers, arms, and confidants, at the palace, hadn't anticipated needing an alternate venue, hadn't prepared accordingly.

But he should have.

He could have kicked himself, if he wasn't half sure he'd have knocked his own feet out from under himself, if he did.

Any anyway, he didn't have time to wait on a stunt like that. The wet whistling in Azkadellia's lungs wouldn't.

 

********

 

Cain--reluctantly, briefly--left Azkadellia in the woods, so he could scour through the little alleys between houses and storefronts unencumbered. He knocked on likely doors, paid a few stray strangers until he got an uneasy tip, and grinding his teeth, he limped for the weak hope.

The urgency almost made him go back for Azkadellia. But the old rules told him he had to find the chop shop on his own first, that he'd have a better chance at assessing their vulnerability to blackmail, attack, or worse. You never brought a civilian into unsecured territory. And no one would be wondering why he was looking for a healer on his own, hobbling like this. 

Besides, if they seemed like they _could_ keep their mouths shut, maybe they could help him drag her ass in.

The little town was situated around one main drag, cleverly called "Main," and a few dirt roads over was a way called "Third Off." Cain didn't have the time or the energy to reflect on the vivid local naming conventions as he counted doors away from this edge of Third Off until he found the dusty blue one, with the little etched symbol in the corner you wouldn't have noticed if you weren't looking for it. He dragged up the low steps of the wood porch--the familiar, wholesome wood porch--and gave a rigid, three-tapped knock, leaning close to the jamb and shielding his face from the road.

There was a reluctant muttering and rustling inside, but after a few interminable moments, the door cracked open, and a face appeared before Cain's, lifted and stared and stopped him in place.

" _You?_ "

 

***

 

Cain limped back to the barrow like a wolf was on his tail, almost turned it around and took Azkadellia home, pierced lung or not. 

But once he caught his breath and steeled his nerves, he put it away and pushed off, back for the smoky blue door, while the Princess pleaded for her life and her death by turns.

"One or the other right soon," Cain muttered darkly, and went on on faith.

 

*****************************

 

"...What's she doing here...?" 

"...thought you didn't ask questions..."

"...lay her down here..."

"...can you help her...?"

"...here, hold her still--put that on the fire, and get me the--"

"--this?"

"--thanks, now the--right, there--sorry, usually I have help, you just..."

"...caught you at a bad time..."

"...Right. I think I can manage, but..."

"...Right."

 

***

 

Blurs of hands, of hair, of kerchiefs and kilts... There was too much of it, Azkadellia thought muzzily, too much earnest woodsy-earthiness here. 

And too much pain.

She felt soaked through with it, saturated to every fiber.

She wondered if she had miscalculated her ploy, if she had undone too much, let too much go. She felt stretched too thin, now, and the warm magic she'd used to sew her side back together before seemed as insubstantial now as smoke between her fingers, unwieldy and unreliable. She might not be able to fix it again, if these village idiots couldn't put her back together in time.

If he'd just taken her to the palace, or run for DG like she'd hoped... If he'd just wheeled himself into the town with her broken in his cart... 

Damn cursed, cautious Tin Men.

Azkadellia closed her eyes, and felt cold. She felt like she was draining, like she was slipping--

When she realized with a start that she'd blacked out, that she was coming back, she bit the inside of her mouth, focused on the little sting, and laid what little of herself she could spare into radiating, into glowing just faintly. She desperately fixed her sister in her mind, and her little tamed lion, too. If Cain wasn't as predictable as she'd hoped, DG was an open book.

And then she felt too winded to go on, and let the little flash die.

...Azkadellia didn't want to die. Not much, anyway.

"Please," she murmured, or thought she did, "help me." And she meant it, but she was too full of bile and resignation to care as much as she thought she ought to.

 

***

 

Cain tried to keep out of the way, once the second chop doc turned up and relieved him. It was too cramped in the little room as it was without him hovering or stumbling around.

There was nothing but waiting, then.

He clasped his hands awkwardly, laid his forehead on their uneasy mass. They felt so large, thick and clumsy as paws, next to the thin ones at work. Fine, nimble hands, so unlike his!

Cain tried not to watch them, tried not to look too long at the needles dipping into places they shouldn't be able to, tried not to stare at the blood. 

Tried not to lose hope.

He closed his eyes tightly and hoped desperately. _Just please don't die on him,_ he prayed silently. _Not here, not now. Don't you dare._

 

**************************

 

The sun was almost gone when the wheelbarrow wended its way back towards the woods, pushed by an unsteady two, now, instead of one. 

When they reached the path, they shook hands silently in the dark, and Cain almost stopped, almost stayed. But there was nothing for it, so he went on pushing his burden alone, full of ghosts and lingering.

A heavy, quiet stillness seemed to lie over all, but Cain was content with the calm, the loss of urgency, the peace, for once in a long time. As he pushed on, the breaks in the leaves above showed him glimpses of the distant darkening sky and the faint shimmer of new stars as the evening grew longer. He picked his way deliberately and slowly over roots and took care to not to jar the barrow (or himself) over much.

By the time he hit the strange blot of openness he had created with his axe, it was so dark that he almost didn't see the huddled shadow in the path.

But he did at last.

_Ambrose._ He sank in the middle, his peace wilting. The gears in his heart seemed to slow, too, to protest and groan a little in the face of it.

Wordlessly, he went around the wagon, and gingerly bundled the half-sleeping Ambrose up into the barrow beside the Princess, one-armed, tucked the shovel in between them. And slower now, groaning and stiff as metal after the rain, he rolled them all home.

 

*******************

 

Cain sat, alone, on the sofa. Partly for the sake of his knee, but partly because no one else seemed willing to sit there.

Azkadellia, ashen and teetering, was too proud of the fragile integrity of her rib cage to lie down, or too unsure of it, and Cain had compromised to let her sit upright--if she was careful--in the guard chair by the bedroom door. And Ambrose, for his part, was too sullen to sit nearer either of them than the door, where he'd dragged a dining chair as far as it would go before sinking down into it.

Cain wanted to laugh, had to bury it in his feet. His two dark, brooding bookends, his sullen, speechless gargoyles, perched at odd angles.

He supposed he was giddy with relief. And the concussion. And the painkillers.

He didn't mind, much.

Ambrose hadn't spoken since they'd gotten home, except to excuse himself jostling Azkadellia on his way into the bathroom. Azkadellia had sighed loudly (too proud of her lungs to do less) and said cryptically, "That was much closer than it needed to be," and "Lucky we found your little friend when we did," and Ambrose had stared at her, and shushed Cain when he tried to explain.

So Cain hadn't said much either, since.

When almost half an hour had passed in increasingly grudging silence, he said, "Should I put on some tea?" but other than a pair of incredulous glares, he had no takers. He palmed out in surrender, and settled back into the cushions with a stifled smile, and much to his surprise, fell soundly and peacefully asleep.

 

***

 

When Cain woke, the lamp was out, and the guard chair was empty. A blurry glance told him enough to quell any worry on that; Azkadellia was in the bed beyond the door, still enough (but not too still).

Ambrose was perched on the arm of the sofa farther from him, all shadows and pale angles in the dark.

"Gargoyle," Cain thought again, dimly, and tried to rub his eyes clear. "Guarding me?" he mumbled aloud, instead, a little hoarsely.

Ambrose didn't say anything, just rubbed his own eyes in what looked like unconscious mimicry. Cain optimistically patted the sofa beside him, but was more than a little surprised when Ambrose actually slipped down from his perch, feet first, into the cushions, laid up against Cain's side gingerly.

Not quite gingerly enough; the weight against his shoulder was just more than it wanted to bear, and Cain bit down on a short gasp too late. But when Ambrose started to bolt, Cain reached across with his good arm, caught him up short. Willing Ambrose calm, willing him to stay, he pulled him back carefully against his body, squeezed him near. Kissed the back of his head and nosed his hair. Breathed slow and steady.

Ambrose unwound by fine degrees, slow as a good watch. 

Cain's tight gears seemed to ease a little with him. And they sat there for a long while, quiet and still.

When he thought it might finally be safe, Cain did speak. Rueful smile in Ambrose's shoulder, he tried, "So, sweetheart... how was your day?"

 

***

There were too many details for Cain to keep track of, in his state. Ambrose was a flood of information, of obscure details and tangents, of nervous laughter and frustration, and there was still too much sap into his synapses for him to quite keep up.

Cain tried his damnedest, though. He repeated things back, asked questions. Hoped he'd managed to memorize the most important details of the interview, at least, or well enough that he'd keep them reasonably straight in his own 'interview' the next day. 

And he tried to do more; he gentled Ambrose like a foal, all fragile tenderness, tried to soothe down his agitations and stroke his hair, tried to laugh and wince at the right places. It was weak--they were tired, and worn thin, the both of them--but it seemed to be enough; by the end of his thread, Ambrose was curled down next to him, head in Cain's lap, looking up at the ceiling and at Cain by turns.

It had been almost an hour, when Ambrose finished thinly, "And then, the tree."

Cain swallowed, sobered.

"Yeah."

"Yeah," agreed Ambrose.

Cain closed his eyes, pet back over Ambrose's skull, zipper and curls.

Only a little wryly, Ambrose asked, "So how was _your_ day?"

 

***

Cain's explanation contained considerably less detail and running commentary, and omitted many key elements, coming down in the end to this: Azkadellia had kept screaming a while after Ambrose left, but then she had stopped, and when Cain had gone in to check on her, it looked like something had gone very wrong. There wasn't any choice but to find a healer. He piled her into the wheelbarrow, took the axe in case he had to cut any splints or debris along the way, and found the nearest person with a reputation of keeping below-board and quiet when needed.

It had worked. It had been awful, and very touch and go, but they'd put her back together a little better, and checked out Cain when they'd finished ("They said you'd done a good job," Cain added, loyally). They'd been loaded up with painkillers, squeezed for money, and sent back home.

"Lucky thing she decided to crack her ribs before I could get home with Bernhaben, I guess," Ambrose laughed, tiredly, but Cain could see the haunted shadow over his eyes.

"Lucky thing," he agreed, anyway.

 

***

 

Awkwardly, Cain and Ambrose tried to make up a bed for two on the sofa, though it mostly consisted of spooning into a corner and propping Cain's leg up on the opposite armrest. Ambrose managed to get them covered with a blanket, and Cain managed to get himself settled enough that he didn't rattle his shoulder or his knee too much when he breathed.

Ambrose was asleep in moments.

Cain, still peaceful from his earlier nap, lingered in the world of the waking a little longer, listening to Ambrose's breathing as it changed and settled, watching one of the moons setting through the window.

As it sank, it shed a little light in across the boards, and Cain followed it mildly as it caught the debris on the floor below the little end table by his head, the little scattering of broken and tumbled knickknacks Azkadellia had cleared when they'd deposited her on the sofa. He craned his chin to get a better look, tucking it over the armrest.

Half the little things on the floor he sleepily realized he couldn't identify: a few unfamiliar bits of porcelain were in shattered pieces on the floor, probably figurines left by the old inhabitants; a pair of little wooden mice he thought Ambrose might have picked up in the village had tumbled down, too, and one their tails had chipped in the fall, but no matter--he could glue that back together. 

But knocked half under the sofa was the little lead horse Jeb had made as a boy, the melted ripple of the bullet still melded into its side. That, he recognized.

Cain reminded himself to pocket it, in the morning, when he could move again without waking Ambrose. Decided to paint over the bullet, one of these days. Decided against it just as soon. Stared at it a long time.

And still trying to keep it in his eyes, and full of whispers and the strangeness of the day, Cain drifted off into uneasy sleep and dreams of half-remembered dreams.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains near misses, and misses that aren't, the revelation of previously obscured identities, visions, smoke, and fire. Warnings: Beheaded flowers, spiteful princesses, a smug inspector, and an unpromising ending.

"Cain..." Ambrose pleaded, dusting Cain's jacket compulsively with his palms. "Please, this is important... The stories--"

"--I know, I know, they have to match. I got surly and went out chopping wood on my bum knee like an idiot. I came back home. Sunshine, grumpy old bastard is the best they're going to get out of me; they'll have to take it and like it."

It wasn't a hard act to pull. The painkillers had left Cain with a hell of a hangover, and when the adrenaline that had carried him through the day before had worn off, he'd seen just how much damage he'd done his knee--and shoulder--and arm--by hauling the little cart through the woods, laden with bodies. He was groggy and hateful of the sunlight, and anything that involved him getting off of the sofa. That covered Bernhaben handily. And Ambrose's constant quizzing and drilling of what he was supposed to say wasn't helping matters any.

After a moment of visible oscillating, lilting foot to foot, Ambrose finally thinned his mouth and nodded. "Well, it'll certainly be believable," he said crossly. "Just remember not to mention--well, anyone, or anything. He'll take any excuse to harass people, the mean old thing."

Cain arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.

In the light of a new day, Ambrose's flusteredness with Acting Investigator Bernhaben had morphed into a strange kind of irritated loathing that Cain hadn't been able to quite fix in place. Cain wondered if there was some history there Ambrose wasn't mentioning, or wasn't remembering--it wouldn't be the first time he'd omitted useful details like that, on purpose or not.

But he suspected the man was just a convenient target. Ambrose might really be wanting to retaliate against the Princess (who had worn his nerves thin with cryptic sniping, that morning), or against Cain (for his petty vengeance on the tree), but they were both frail and beaten, and Bernhaben was, as far as Cain knew, healthy, and anyway absent. Ambrose could direct as much spite and ire in his direction as he had contained in his tightly wound body without risking lashing out at anyone more fragile. Bernhaben was an acceptable target, if Cain wasn't.

And Ambrose wasn't looking at Cain much. That was a poor sign.

Cain ground his teeth curiously for a moment, and watched while Ambrose remembered he'd been headed to the stove, before he'd decided Cain needed another round of quizzing. Giving in, he asked simply, "You mad at me?"

"Mad?" Ambrose asked, vaguely, only half attentive. His left hand was attempting to add the berries to the oatmeal _before_ it was cooked, rather than _after._

"...About the tree," Cain expanded.

"Ah. Yes. No--I'm--I'm traumatized," Ambrose began, finally setting the berries back down in their bowl. "Traumatized and shocked and scattered, and awfully sore, but not actually mad at you for cutting it down," he explained, surprisingly clearly. 

Cain blinked, and felt his mangled spirits lift slightly.

"It's probably for the best that the damn thing is gone," Ambrose sighed. "Then I can't..."

Cain looked up sharply. 

When Ambrose didn't continue, Cain prompted, "Then you can't what?"

"Can't..." Ambrose tried again, frowned, and then lost the thread completely. "Cain, do you smell smoke?"

After that, things seemed to go downhill very quickly.

 

***************

 

"Bernie, you have to listen to me," DG insisted, stamping her foot. "I swear, I felt something from Az last night, and it was coming from that town on the other side of the grounds. I couldn't--I couldn't get much from her, just... just pain, and it was a tiny, cramped room, and there were men there, and there was smoke, and--"

"How many men?" Acting Investigator Bernhaben interrupted, even though she was a Princess.

"I don't know," DG responded, barely derailed. "I think two or three. Or maybe two men and a woman... It was hard to see, but they had her in that tiny little room and she was hurt and it was," (and here she pointed fiercely like a child) "over _there._ And you need to take some people out there and _find her,_ 'cause she might still be there."

Bernhaben paused to consult a page of notes.

"Princess Dorothy Gale," he said calmly, "I cannot presently, given your information, pursue your wishes. We have already searched the town thoroughly, and the Princess Azkadellia was not present. Furthermore, I have appointments coming up presently, including interviewing Mister Cain to verify--"

"Damn it, Bernard, forget about Mister Cain and get back out to that town! So what if she wasn't there when you checked? She could have gone there afterwards! What if she was kidnapped? What if they're moving her as we speak?" DG railed, her voice raising uncharacteristically into something frantic and demanding.

Bernhaben once again, very slowly, consulted the page.

"Are you certain of the validity of your vision, Princess Dorothy Gale?"

DG nodded fiercely. "I _know_ I was feeling Azkadellia, and Raw was--was with me, and he said he was sure it was from her, and from right then at that moment. _And,_ " she added suddenly, "from that direction."

Another protracted pause.

"And is it your direct order that, on this information, I proceed to the town to repeat my search?"

DG's eyes glinted and hardened. "Yes. Inspector," she said, drawing herself up straight, "I command you to lead a search of the town."

"As you command, Princess," Bernhaben said automatically, stepping to attention.

"And I'm coming," DG added, turning to stalk out first.

"As you command," Bernhaben repeated, and, after gathering his things, followed her, if in rather his own time, towards the grounds.

As he followed, he paused to send two runners: one to gather a guard contingent for a search, and one to inform Wyatt Cain that their interview would be postponed until after a more pressing avenue of inquiry was pursued thoroughly.

The second runner passed DG as she stamped across the grounds toward the thin road that cut around the wood. He broached the treeline about the same time that the first runner had gathered a sufficient company, and they, just behind Bernhaben, were starting at a steady clip toward the road.

 

***

Everything seemed to have happened so fast...

Cain had limped to the back room, to try to swat out the bedspread that Azkadellia had somehow conspired to light, with herself on top of it. 

And then there was a pounding on the door, and Ambrose was running to put out _that_ fire, before it could spark. And he even managed to bluff the suspicious runner away with sheer aplomb, claiming a kitchen fire, and Cain was proud of him. 

There were a few more frantic moments, but Cain got the little smoldering fire to stop, in the end, by unceremoniously dumping a pail of water over the bed, Azkadellia included, and her indignant spluttering was so perfectly absurd that Cain and Ambrose both collapsed at their little table, giddy with the relief from their panic, choking on terrified laughter. 

And so, it was a few minutes more of relative relief and peace before Ambrose wondered aloud at why Bernhaben's men would be going back to the village.

***

Cain sobered. Panic swept back over him with the vengeance of the deferred. 

"The village?" he repeated, throat suddenly dry, "Are you sure?"

"Well, I'm not positive, but the messenger was making straight for the road," Ambrose argued, a little displeased at being doubted. "I watched him a little while, since he seemed to be in a hurry," he added, folding his arms in only a little defiance. "Anyway, why? Is that a problem?"

"In a hurry," Cain repeated vaguely, as the icy tightening in his chest made him wonder if his heart were about to wind down or break a spring. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and hoped it was just the concussion. He closed his eyes and tried to gather his wits.

What had Ambrose said about DG, yesterday? Something about her getting a 'bad vibe' from somewhere...? They'd been in the village, Azkadellia had been on death's door... DG was getting so good at finding the things she wanted to find, she'd said...

Azkadellia's voice floated in on the tense silence from the next room. "Two little princesses, dancing in a row..." she lilted, high and wan. And then she giggled, on some bent impulse of her own.

A phantom pain shot through Cain's chest, and his good hand lurched up to clutch at it.

He felt the little horse in his pocket, there. It had taken some painful, creaking bending to get down to the floor, that morning, but he had rescued it from the shadows and a lone dustbunny by the edge of the sofa, and now it was right over his heart, just where it had been when it had saved him from Zero's gun. When Jeb had saved his life.

And no longer really thinking, Cain hauled himself up and onto the make-shift crutch Ambrose had given him and out, starting a sharp angle through the woods, towards the village.

"Please, please, please," he prayed to no one in particular, "not again. Please, not again..."

 

*******

 

"Cain!" Ambrose stammered, following him out the door. "Where are you going?"

But Cain was already yards ahead, and showed no signs of slowing. 

"Come back!" Ambrose tried again, shouting after him, "You're going to hurt yourself even worse!" And then, "What if they come back?"

But it was to no avail; Cain was gone.

Ambrose knew he could catch him, if he tried. He was surely faster, especially now that Cain was the walking wounded. But what if they _did_ come back? No one would be here except for Azkadellia and her singed sheets, and what a pretty picture that would be!

Ambrose humphed, and threw himself down dejectedly by the garden, laid his arms on his knees and his chin on his arms. He stared hard and moodily after the last tree he'd glimpsed Cain beside, before losing sight of him. 

Soon enough, though, he grew bored of the vigil, and anyway it was clear Cain was not going to suddenly reappear from the trees, seeing the error of his ways, or at least ready to explain what in the world was going on in his head, and why he so badly had to get to the village. So Ambrose began picking pods off of the sugar peas with spiteful snaps, and deadheading flowers, and muttering unkindly to himself. And when he ran out of dead flowers to snip, he went onto the live ones, catching himself only after he'd beheaded a half dozen.

"Damn," he scolded himself, sighed, and finally gave it up as a bad job. "'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,' Ambrose," he murmured. And scooping up the buds and open faces into his palms, he rolled back up to his feet and shook the little debris from his legs.

Pleased (and a little surprised) by his own grace, and distracted by the flowers, he began to lose his tentative grip on his concern, and the last of it had eluded him by the time he had wandered back inside to set the flowers to floating in a bowl of water. He went back for the sugar peas, but returned afterwards to the bowl, to rearrange the flowers in the cool water, to bob them up and down and catch them in tiny swirls and eddies. And this soothed him, and occupied him in a building, mindless calm for a little while. For long enough.

Consequently, he forgot for the moment to worry about how Azkadellia had caught fire in the first place, and whether she might be able to do it again. He forgot to worry about the runners, blissfully even forgot the blasted Bernhaben for a sweet few minutes. He dipped his face close to the fragrant petals to blot out the lingering twinges of soot and burnt fabric that lingered on the air, wrapped himself up in the smell of the flowers. And consequently, when Azkadellia quietly scraped her fingernails down the wallpaper beside the bed, leaving tiny, silent curls of blue flame behind in the grooves, it took him rather longer than it might have to notice.

******

Cain cursed himself for not having a plan. He knew he had to get there before the search party did, but not what he could do when he got there. Warn him? Tell him to run? And what about the others--bribe them for silence? Threaten them? Kill them?

There would be no irrefutable signs of Azkadellia to lead Bernhaben's men to the chop docs, he hoped. But if DG had routed them there... If DG could tell by sheer magic that her sister had been there, it wouldn't matter. If Bernhaben got to them before Cain did, someone might cow under the numbers, might say what they'd seen. They might say just who it was who had brought in the broken princess, in hopes of buying their way out of their complicity in her hiding, buying mercy, buying a blind eye.

...No. Not Jeb. Cain was certain of that much. But if his boy was even there when Bernhaben arrived, it would be too much of a risk--they'd immediately look to Cain. And the others... he knew nothing of them, other than what small assurances Jeb muttered in the dark. Jeb seemed to trust them, and Cain wanted that to be enough, but...

Gods, it had been such a shock to find him there. To see him there at all, to see him by chance, and in the village after so long out of touch... But to find him there in a hovel with a secret mark on the door, in the company of refugees?

There hadn't been much time for small talk, but Cain had wheedled out enough. Jeb had picked up a lot of the basics of medics by necessity, when his healers started going down in the fighting. Anyone who could spare an hour put in duty with the one remaining healer as she dealt with the wounded, and Jeb, as one of the captains, had taken the responsibility to heart, dug down and grappled until he had as much knowledge in his fine, clever hands as they could hold. He could work metal, he could carve... how different were the pieces of a body, after that? he'd asked.

Cain had shaken his head, too stunned to fathom. 

Jeb had never advanced enough to where he'd call himself a healer, he'd explained, but with the woman behind him (Cain somehow missed her name), he was confident enough to help save a life when it was salvageable, or at least slow down the demise long enough for her to get there. And Jeb had known the moment that all the fighting was over that that was what he wanted to do with himself. The healer would go on healing just as she always had--and Jeb had decided that he wanted to go on doing it, too.

But they were doing it underground. They were doing it quietly, for people who needed that kind of thing done quietly.

That part, Cain still didn't understand. Why they were lying low, what they feared from the new order, or if it was still the old order they were dodging from, whether it was Jeb or her--or both--who were hiding... They had an alliance between them, but Cain didn't know where that left him and couldn't trust it. Jeb might love him, Jeb might go stony and silent to prison before admitting he'd so much as seen his father with the Princess, but what about the other shadows there? Were there others who worked with them? Did anyone else live there?

There were too many loose ends, too many variables to account for. And even if they kept their mouths shut about Cain, what if Bernhaben had a viewer? Or just swept them up and into cells to hold them for their silence?

Cain couldn't allow that, either. He couldn't let his boy get locked up, not for him. He had to do... had to do something.

But in the end, it turned out that all he had to do was be there.

 

********

 

The search party was only a narrow road away from the blue door when its two leaders stopped, both at once, both suddenly.

DG, for her part, cried out, frozen in her tracks, and clutched her hair, screaming about fire.

And Bernhaben turned toward the sound of foot-and-crutch-steps in the narrow road perpendicular to them, just in time to catch a glimpse of Wyatt Cain, bolting in the same direction he and his party had been headed. Then, he'd smelled the thin whisp of smoke on the breeze.

Then, he'd sighed, and allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction.

 

********

 

Everything fell apart.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains police brutality, subtlety, and destruction. Warnings: pocket watches; fire.

Everything fell apart.

It had been enough, circumstantial or not, to take Wyatt Cain into custody for questioning and possible arraignment. He had still officially been listed as a "person of interest," and now that he had tried to beat the search party to their destination... It looked enough like intent to tamper with the investigation, whatever it was he meant to do. And once the Princess Dorothy Gale had insisted her sister was on fire, and once it was perfectly clear where there _was_ fire, and where there was _not,_ it was a simple task to find her. The search of the town was halted, and the party marched on the Cottage-at-the-Field, leaving Wyatt Cain shackled to a horse post, under the guard of two of the men he had less severely injured in resisting arrest, until the inspection of the cottage could be completed and a stabler method of transporting the injured man in their custody could be arranged. (It was immediately deemed far more trouble than it was worth to try to drag him, kicking and buckling and wounded, along to the cottage, and anyway he'd have just been in the way, that much Bernhaben was sure about.)

At first, Cain hollered and shouted after them until he was hoarse. And to their credit, the guards on him only indulged the urge to kick him once, to quiet him down, and the part of Cain that was still Tin at the core appreciated that.

The part of him that was concussed, lost, and horrified, though, kept struggling and shouting until the energy wore out and the pain was too much. When it did, and was, he sank to the ground, temporarily defeated and stunned.

Gods, what were they going to do?

***

At least, Cain thought, while he tried not to listen for sounds in the woods that were too dim to make out at this distance anyway, they hadn't kept after Jeb. Finding Cain in the town--and finding Azkadellia at the cottage--should put the kibosh on following up on the now useless lead. Jeb, he prayed, should be safe.

When he'd get to see him again, well... That was something else entirely. At least he hadn't failed both the men in his life, that day.

Cain hunkered down into a lower slump and laid his forehead on his healthier knee, and prayed that Ambrose would be all right, prayed that he would lie or play dumb or something, that he would go quietly and not get himself hurt. Cain prayed Ambrose would let Cain take the fall and be done with it. Cain prayed Azkadellia would keep her trap shut.

That prayer, even more than the others, seemed in vain. But they all seemed in vain, when he lingered on them long.

If they took Ambrose in... or even if he ran... when would Cain get to see _him_ again?

 

**************

 

Ambrose felt like he was underwater. Everything had gone distant and muffled, from Azkadellia's screeching to the crackling of the fire threatening to cave the corner of the roof in their bedroom, the pounding on the door, the sound of it eventually breaking in... There was one mass of horrible din, and he was deaf with it, receiving it all through ears too full to hear.

The world was overfull, too. He was moving too fast, or the rest of the world was, for him to keep the shapes clear, and he felt blind through the watery blurring of everything around him, even to the men, and even to the fire.

He struggled without direction to keep trying to beat at the fire, or move Azkadellia, or keep from being captured, but the aims did not go together, and eventually the world tilted dizzily when he was thrown over the shoulder of someone he hadn't managed to incapacitate in the attempt. Then there was ground--hard--and a flash of heat, but a splash of water just as soon that drowned it back out. 

Men were still inside, trying to contain the burning, but it was late on the list of priorities behind getting Azkadellia out--and keeping DG out--where it was safer, and without further injury. Ambrose was a long way behind the Princesses in terms of priority--especially now--but they hadn't been able to work through him and had had to move him first, just the same.

He struggled back up to his knees, wet to the bone, and tried to focus on the cottage. The men that weren't busy trying to stabilize Azkadellia or the man Ambrose had hurt were busy trying to put out the blaze, but Ambrose could see that they were moving too slowly; they weren't bailing water fast enough, they weren't putting in enough effort, they were inefficient, and at this rate, even if the fire was stopped the damage would be too devastating to bear.

In the haze he was in, Ambrose couldn't get past that thought, and he went hurtling back towards the house and fire.

 

***********

Cain felt sick. There was too much smoke; it had to be bad, it had to be too bad.

There were footsteps near him, but he ignored them, ignored the guards. He hadn't been able to dismantle the cuffs, and his shoulder was wrecked from trying, and he had finally gone still, stony and as calm as he could force himself to be.

He couldn't hold it all. There was too much to keep inside, so he closed his eyes and closed it off.

Cain imagined a pocket watch, imagined its ticking; he folded the watch closed in his hand, slipped it into an inside pocket of a forgotten coat.

When he could still hear it, he folded the coat down and tossed it aside. Thought better of it, and folded it into a trunk, instead, and tucked the trunk into the back of a closet. And stacked some blankets and boxes on top of it, for good measure.

It would be safe there, if he ever got the chance to go back for it.

Eventually, it was enough.

He finally felt still, finally felt quiet. The beat was absorbed under layers until it was silent to him, and he sighed, shutting down.

He was even quiet enough, and long enough, that one of the guards felt safe enough to leave the other alone with him while he went to bum some water from the nearest store. If he'd worried about that decision, he needn't have; Cain was almost blind with pain, and was trying to go deaf by sheer force of will. He wouldn't be going anywhere on his own soon.

"Hey," a young voice said, above him, too loudly to ignore. He gritted his teeth and tried anyway.

"Hey," the guard returned casually, though he straightened up just a little to keep an eye on things. Under better circumstances, Cain would have appreciated the calm; it had been a long time since he'd seen people serving who weren't Longcoats. It was a good change.

He still had no interest in hearing their small talk, though, and focused on the sound of his own breathing, steady and slow.

"So what's going on?" the kid continued above him. "There were some dozen guys coming up the block, you catch him?"

"Him?" the guard asked, cautiously.

"Whoever you must've been chasing."

In spite of himself, Cain's ears pricked up. The voice--

"Looks like it might be that way," the guard replied noncommittally. 

"Huh," said Jeb. "This him?"

"This man's helping us with our investigations--you want to leave him alone, okay?"

"Okay, right," Jeb agreed. "Right, sorry about that. Well, you need anything else, you let us know. You guys want some water or something?"

"Thanks, already getting some."

"Okay. Our door's open if you need, though. Doesn't look like he's going anywhere."

The tiny flare of sedate hope in Cain was too small to live long, so he wasn't too disappointed when the guard thanked Jeb but asked him to head on home, just the same. Cain sighed silently as the boots in his peripheral carried his son away from him.

At least he knew his boy was all right. Reassurance of things like that was going to be thin and hard to come by, and he would take it where he could get it.

 

************

Ambrose could do little in the house. And when three men wrestled him tightly enough, they managed to shackle his wrists behind his back, and that made dragging him back outside to safety a little easier. He hadn't caught any part of himself on fire, this time, at least, but he was dangerous enough to the rest of them on his own.

The guards were starting to figure that out, though not quickly enough. As soon as Ambrose got one foot under him, he kicked the jaw out of place of a man who tried to handle him. But the balance was wrong, and he went over, and this time they were ready to flatten him to hold him still. There was shouting, and more shackles were gathered to bind his ankles, but the two guards stayed on top of him to keep down his thrashing even so. 

One eventually gagged him on an improvised wad of fabric, so he might have been one of the ones screaming.

The flames were dying, but still cropping up in odd corners in strange tendrils, as if they were trying to dodge around the men controlling them. Ambrose watched them intently even as he fought to get back to them.

Ambrose knew it would be over soon, but it was never soon enough. And as the smoke caught up to his lungs, he finally fell still except for the coughing, and the din--the terrible din--began to die down. 

His eyes grew wet, reflecting the last odd curls of orange. It began to soothe the stinging there, but not enough.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains dreaming, waking, separation, reunion. Warnings: a stuffed animal and a stuff neck.

They were brought in separately. The damage each of the two had done on his own was enough, and combined, it was agreed, it would be more than the sum of its parts. 

Cain was left in town, sore and uncomfortable, for another half hour after the fire was put out, while they brought around a cart, and when they bundled him in, they took the road around the wood, and a further fork to keep them off the green and away from the cottage. He couldn't even see how much of the cottage was still standing, whether the search party was still there, whether they'd all gone, whether--whether there were any bodies...

On the way, he sank further and further into himself. All he could think of was fire and smoke and Ambrose, so he tried not to think at all. He wound down until he had stopped moving altogether, and twice he was nudged to assure he was still alive and aware, and hadn't gone into some sort of attack, or catatonic stupor. He grunted each time, but nothing more.

He marched obediently (--limped, obediently) when they got him up; he sat when they sat him down, stood when they stood him up, spoke when they required, but didn't remember what he said. Maybe something about it being his fault, about leaving everyone else alone.

Maybe not.

The world closed in on him like a shell, like some cocoon of silence and torpor, and he registered little but the cell he was carried down to, and the unearthly quiet and emptiness down there in the shade. There was a dim electric light, but it seemed far away.

The bolt of the lock seemed to echo as it slid into place.

He had never felt so lonely.

***

There was emptiness.

Even in the suit... Even then, Cain had had Jeb and Adora with him, albeit in an endless loop of torture and his own impotence to help, to do anything to stop it. Here... Here, there was nothing.

It could have been peaceful. There were no screams, there was no chatter; the light made occasional crackling hums, but they were quiet, thin as fireflies in the night. A broom would sweep down along some corridor, now and then, but the sight of other bodies was rare, and sleep could have come easily on the cot. He seemed to be alone, down here.

He slept, sometimes.

He kept no track of time.

He heard no clock, no ticking of the hours, no grinding of gears. His own heartbeat was as silent to him as if it were miles away, buried in loose earth.

There was nothing. Desolate, peaceful quiet.

Cain slept, and didn't; he dreamt, and didn't.

***

Cain dreamed of Adora.

He dreamt of her hair, of her swaying with the baby on her hip while Jeb's tiny fingers curled and tangled in one of the long blonde wisps that had escaped her braid, pulling her down until she nuzzled his forehead with hers, kissed his nose, cooed and puffed at him.

He dreamed of Jeb, of his thin hands working to mold lead, to carve thin details, to paint, hands fine as his mother's. He dreamt of needles, and sewing, and sutures.

He dreamt of different hands, finer still, stitching into purple velvet, into colors like plums and leaves and berries, winding tiny screws into tinier bolts, bending fragile wires, pulling zippers and freeing buttons. He dreamt of Ambrose, and his fine hands, one obediently clutching his coat, the other plunging out into fool's errands, tangling in fabric, crushing berries, pushing on doors, grasping onto people.

He dreamt of Ambrose, leaning out of Azkadellia's window, fingers twitching on the wind where her body had been. Pushing? Grasping? He saw his own hands, folding around Azkadellia's throat, saw hers below them, fluttering and becoming still, but never clutching, never clawing. 

He lurched awake. He wished he hadn't.

***

After what may have been days, or hours, or one long night or two, some semblance of life took up in his surroundings. Or if it had been creeping in already, Cain began to take some small notice of it again. Someone would pace through quietly now and again; someone would bring food. He began to hear sounds like clicking, like paper, and wondered if someone was playing cards in some room out of sight, down some thin corridor. He heard occasional chatter, low voices murmuring together about nothing important.

Nothing seemed important.

Cain wondered if the silence would have been better.

On the heels of the useless sounds, other things began to creep in; there was a dull throb in his chest, in his stomach, a feeling like sickness and gnawing. There was a pain in his shoulder that was gruesome, and it took his breath away when he moved and it caught him unawares.

He was tired; achingly, deeply tired.

Cain eventually pushed the wooden bench in his cell until the end butted up against the bars, so he could straddle it and have somewhere to lay his forehead. The bars were cool, and when he registered his skin at all, it felt hot and uncomfortable, and the cool metal helped. Laying his head forward on the bars took some of the weight off of his shoulder, and off of a back and neck now stiff as sin.

This way, too, he could watch, though there was nothing much to see.

But then, like out of a dream, there was something. Just a glimpse, in slow-motion; there was a metal grinding sound, the clink of chain, and it drew his eye to a corridor.

It was hard to tell, between the guards; the restraints were such that the shape was blurred and hard to make out, and the movement was lilting and lurching from the short lengths given at the ankles, and what seemed to be some sort of chronic state of imbalance. But the shape was familiar just the same, and the gait, however altered, the uneasy swing and twist.

And Cain could see dark hair, almost black, and a glimpse of wild black eyes.

"Ambrose," he groaned, in a thin rush.

He fancied the wild eyes did dip up to him, then, did lock onto his. He fancied there was a brief connection, and instance of unity over the distance. And then Ambrose was gone, across the corridor and away, and it was over.

But in spite of himself, Cain felt the lump, lump ticking as his impossible heart tried to pound in his chest. And all of its settled silence and stillness was undone, and he hurt all the way down to the center. It knocked the wind out of him. And when he got his breath back, he used it for sounds undignified and uncontrolled and wove an arm through the bars tightly to keep from being swallowed down by the current.

 

****************

 

There was a delay, while realization clicked into place, but Ambrose finally shouted, "Cain!" just after he lost sight of him. Or, at least, he tried; it was lost in the gag.

That, someone had tried to explain, was for his own good, since his bursts of violent ranting sometimes sounded dangerously like sedition, and that wouldn't help him any. Plus, it was keeping people up at night on the floors above, haunted by the wailing.

Very little of this had actually registered on Ambrose. Very little of anything actually present in his world had been absorbed as it was.

The shackles had been too much. The shackles, the sight of Azkadellia before him, the way his body was screaming, "Danger, run!"--it had all been too much. Ambrose had lost hold and couldn't get it back. The world was a nightmare blur of pain and terror, and he couldn't do anything but fight, but hide, but try to get away.

The fact that the binds persisted--and, indeed, naturally, increased by layers, every time he managed to injure another person--and that his surroundings were dark and dim and cell-like (in fact, a cell); the fact that there were guards, the fact that he was alone, the fact that some part of his shell-shocked brain knew Azkadellia was involved, all of it fed into the fugue state. He wept and he fought, whoever came to him, whatever was happening.

They had tried to clean his clothes; he hadn't let them. He worried at the burnt and blackened edges of a sleeve whenever he could reach it. They had tried to tend the burns on his left arm; he had tried to bite them (another reason for the gag). Everything that came to him was dangerous; everything that touched or neared was one step closer to oblivion.

He didn't eat. He didn't sleep.

After the first two days, they stopped sedating him, since the exhaustion seemed to have caught up with him. When he was weak enough, and not inclined to scream, they tried ungagging him, tried to question him, interrogate him, even to just get him to confirm his name (though they knew who he was), but rarely did his answers correspond to their questions. When they did, it seemed more by accident than design.

Eventually, they had had to give in and move him, in hopes the medics and the viewers could do something in their own space they hadn't managed here.

And that's when Cain glimpsed him; when Ambrose felt his first jolt of connection to the world, felt a panicked crumbling of some dangerous veneer from the surface of things, like the shattering of glass.

His comparatively sedate march ended. He twisted, tried to turn back, and when he couldn't, he buckled his knees, tried to break back and away, tried even just to fall to get a little closer, to get one more look at Cain.

He tried to argue through the gag--even coherently, not that they could tell--tried to beg, wanted to clasp his hands in the universal gesture of pleading, but his arms were fixed behind him and immobile. In the end, he only succeeded in falling to his knees, bowing over them in a strange resemblance of prayer, of submission.

To his escort, this was not particularly distinguishable from anything else he'd done previously, so he was hauled back up to his feet and out.

***

It was understood to be a risk to move Ambrose out through the palace. For one, he was dangerous to move and to be around; the Princess Azkadellia was recovering slowly and reluctantly under the care of the medics and healers nearby, and they'd had enough guards put out of commission as it was. For another, the palace was abuzz with very, very angry people (and some with conflicted feelings of their own), so it might not be particularly safe for _him._

And for another, the Princess DG--despite seeing his involvement with her own eyes, witnessing his assaults on guards, seeing Azkadellia hidden in his home, confirming he'd lied to her and to the Inspector--was determinedly reserving judgment on the entire situation, and if she saw him being hauled through the halls in chains, she would probably cause trouble. A lot more trouble than they wanted to deal with.

But they couldn't come up with anything else to get him sobered, compliant, or non-violent, so they took the risk.

 

***********

 

The guards withered uncomfortably beneath the scrutiny of the medic. He stood, arms folded, silent as a menacing schoolteacher, eyebrows arched expectantly.

"He was--I'm sorry, this is just--out of the blue..." one began, but it died out.

Ambrose was sitting quietly--even primly--in the examination chair, fingers laced together on his knees, ankles crossed, back straight. The guards looked infinitely foolish.

They had made something of a fuss for the medic, warning him of the dangers of the former advisor, of the incoherence and ranting, of the violence. And when the gag came off, Ambrose had stood quite still and tall and asked them fairly acidly if they could please get him a glass of water, as the gag was wreaking havoc on the balance of the delicate systems of his mouth, and he'd rather not wind up with cavities over such a simple oversight. Or, for that matter, dehydrated and dead. He reminded them he had not had any water since they had stopped injecting him with it, along with their sedatives, and that soon it would reach something of a danger point.

The medic's look had clearly read, "This is unacceptable," but he had refused to say it out loud, and the guards had scrambled to explain themselves--to explain the cautions they had taken, the orders they were under. Ambrose sat back quietly, mind spinning on a giddy high of tiny triumphs while the guards dug themselves a hole, undeserved though it might have been.

"He hasn't eaten, either?" the medic confirmed.

"The blisters haven't been treated, or even examined?" he had interjected. And that was when, against their better judgments, the men had been cowed into unbinding him down to the ankles, from what looked in the filtered mirror of Ambrose's lucidity and calm like a clear case of excessive caution. Ambrose had winced and whinged tenderly when the medic had set to work soaking the fabric off of his damaged skin--the burns had grown ugly and damaged by now--but had kept up a suitably brave face, otherwise, with only a hint of sulky satisfaction.

The sight of the burns when they were uncovered was almost too much for his calm, though; blisters had torn and grown infected, terrible blotches of white and red mottled his angry forearm up to the elbow. The medic changed tactics long enough to lecture the escort on the danger of untreated burns of this size, especially when they grew infected, and informed them that, indeed, hallucinations and delirium were a sure sign of dangerous infection, and that Ambrose should have been brought in immediately, and it was a wonder he wasn't dead.

Ambrose, understandably, did not disabuse him of this notion. He was fairly sure he had been the largest obstacle to his own care, and that the wildness was of its own making, but there was too much else at stake.

He was single-minded, now. He must get back to Cain.

***

Ambrose spent the next two days in relatively low security, tethered to the sterile cot by a cuff on his right wrist (and still with a short length between his ankles--the guards had not given that one up) while he was under the care of the medics for his arm. He tried very hard not to look at the swollen blisters--especially the infected ones--when the gauze was changed and the burns were soaked, as his stomach seemed to have gone quite delicate, but he took enough glances to make sure the arm was behaving itself.

It twitched, now and then, fingers wavering in water, but he was perversely thankful that the damage seemed to have sedated it, for the time being.

When they began treating him for the infection, though, his certainty of his own health began to slip. There was a persistent, low-grade fever, they'd told him, but when his body got the help to fight it, he felt sicker than he had.

He wondered if he'd been running on momentum and adrenaline, and if--now that he was comparatively safe, comparatively sound--it was going to evaporate, and leave him in a sickly crash.

And that is, approximately, what happened.

***

The fever got worse before it got better, and two more days passed that Ambrose could frighteningly recall very little of. He found himself _in_ the cot, now, with only the barest restraint, but as he didn't think he had the strength to stand, he entertained no brave ideas of escape.

He felt nauseous. He wasn't sure whether it was the medicine or the fear that if they hadn't brought him in, he might have after all gotten very sick, indeed.

The weakness was unbearable and frightening.

Hours disappeared at a time, without trace, and Ambrose began to fear he would slip, again, that he would lose hold and find himself back in the cell, or (worse) lost back in the dream of Azkadellia, and the years before. He cried without realizing he was doing it, tears of fever and fear.

But in a late afternoon, he woke to something soft and plushy and covered in fur, clutched in his good arm. There was a hand resting on top of it--small and pretty, with the nails chewed to the quick--and he blinked his eyes mildly until he saw DG sitting beside him, idly petting whatever stuffed animal she had brought him in his sleep.

When she saw his eyes open, she gave him a weak, brave smile.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," Ambrose tried to reply, but the sound didn't come, caught dry in his throat.

DG looked at him long with her big and curious eyes, sad and studying, and Ambrose couldn't meet it for long, looked back down to her hand, to the tawny tufts of the unidentifiable plush. 

It was quiet a little too long, but finally DG moved, pulling her hand back to her lap to worry at it. 

"Azkadellia won't let us help," she said, uneasily. "Can we--Raw and me--can we see about speeding this thing along?"

It took Ambrose several blurry moments to extract the promise of healing out of that, but when he did, he swallowed, swept sick with guilt, but nodded, once and twice. He hadn't even noticed Raw, tucked back and over behind his Princess.

Ambrose nodded again, forced his throat clear enough to say, "Yes," and "thank you," and when DG and Raw joined hands and came up against the cot, he closed his eyes and clutched the toy and tried not to cry anymore.

 

*****************

 

DG didn't ask him about what had happened. The healing was enough, for that; it meant that, while he wasn't at peak condition, he would be well enough to be returned to the cells, to participate in the investigation. And once Ambrose was able to clean and dress himself, shakily, in the bland and shapeless and colorless clothes they had to replace his damaged ones, his wrists were secured carefully behind his back, and he was walked back down through the palace, to the low stairway and lower corridor, to the scattering of cells that still lurked beneath.

"Can I... Can I be closer to Cain?" he heard himself asking, quietly, when they reached the bottom of the stairs. 

There was a hesitation in the guard with him (not one of the ones he'd left looking foolish and cruel, thank the gods), when they reached the junction of the two small blocks. He had a mixed reputation, now, for certain. But he must have looked frail enough and tired enough and lonely enough, because after a long moment, the guard tugged Ambrose's elbow gently to the left, instead of the right.

Ambrose wordlessly stepped into the empty cell the guard opened, turned placidly so the guard could release him, and murmured a thanks along his shoulder as the man locked the door and left.

He was alone in his new cell, and there was no one to either side of him, but when he turned to grip the bars, to lean against them, he saw a sleeping figure far back in the cell across and slightly over, shadowed by the bad light, but familiar enough.

Ambrose didn't want to wake him, but he studied where Cain's bench was placed, and quietly as he could dragged his own over to a similar spot, and laid himself across it on his stomach, folding his chin on his wrists to watch the cell opposite.

The fear that had been blossoming and spreading twisted down into a tight knot in his belly, more acute and painful, but more manageable.

The reprieve of quiet and sickness would end soon. They were both here, now, healthy enough and lucid enough, and the specter of Bernhaben's investigations loomed large over him.

But if Cain was here... If Cain was close enough that Ambrose could see him, if not touch him, not with his fingers even stretched full out across the way to Cain's... that was enough.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains jealousy, evasion, improvisation, and air currents; also, Azkadellia tips her hand.  
> Warnings: A glimpse inside of a scary brain; an only semi-satisfactory resolution to our problems; porches; acronyms.

Ambrose was pacing, now. Bernhaben had been through twice that morning, and each time, Ambrose wound into a tighter ball of tension right under Cain's eyes. Ambrose's left arm--still badly scarred, but healthy enough to work marginally well--looked like it was fixing to betray him, swerving on his own as he walked, like it were conducting some invisible orchestra in an angry symphony.

...Maybe the Inspector hadn't just been a convenient target after all.

Cain laid his head against the bars, lacing his arms through and around them in a tired embrace. "Hey..." he began quietly, to catch his attention, and Ambrose's head snapped up.

"What?" he asked, immediately approaching the bars, sinking as fast into a mimic of Cain's posture as he could. Only as he did, his thin knees poked through as well, and some of his curls, and he wound up belly flat to the surface of the bars, looking more like he was clinging to them than anything else.

The sight made Cain hurt. Suddenly he didn't want to ask Ambrose about Bernhaben, anymore. It couldn't do any good, couldn't take any of the hurt out of the body across from him.

But Ambrose stared, shifted anxiously. "What is it?" he repeated, and looked a little desperate to talk, to connect somehow.

Cain couldn't leave him like that. And couldn't think of anything else to say. So reluctantly, he observed, "You really hate this Bernhaben guy."

Predictably, Ambrose scowled and looked away. The fingers of his left hand began curling around an iron bar.

Cain almost decided to drop it again, at that. But when Ambrose looked like his nerves were winding back up, like he might get back up to his pacing soon, Cain pressed on. "...Want to tell me why?"

"What, arresting us wasn't enough?"

Cain nodded. "I expect so. But you were mad as sin before that, too."

Ambrose laid the side of his head against the bars, still not looking back to Cain, and Cain sighed inwardly. Gods, he wished he could reach out and pat the mess of curls, do something to give a scrap of comfort.

He wished he could get a little comfort, too. He looked at the floor, and tried to quash down the feeling of helplessness.

"I guess I was," Ambrose admitted, and Cain agreed.

There was a long quiet before Ambrose could say anything else. When he did, he mumbled, "...I think he might be one of the new Advisors to the Queen."

_Ah._

Cain dug up indignant disbelief, or an approximation of it. "What, that jerk?" he asked, scowling for Ambrose's sake.

Ambrose was caught off guard by his own laugh, and Cain's aches seemed to ease off a little at the sound.

 

*************

 

The allegation of prisoner abuse--abuse of _Ambrose,_ her dearest friend--was too much. The Queen had determined to leave Bernhaben to his work, but this, she handled herself.

She was numb, but listened to every statement.

Tried to listen. Sometimes it nicked a little too close to the skin, and the sting distracted her.

"It was like he was mad," the guard defended himself. "He kept screaming about the Princess and Longcoats, like he thought he was surrounded. He--he's dangerous, your Majesty, he broke more bones among our men than we have men, he just wouldn't stop fighting. We _couldn't_ get close enough to help him, I swear, we tried to follow protocol, we tried to help..."

The Queen looked away, over and out towards a window. "I see."

"Since then... Since the medic, I mean... Your Majesty, you'd have no idea, to look at him now, but I swear he was dangerous when we found him. Even the best of us are afraid to go near him, still." He paused, and then: "We did what we could."

The Queen nodded quietly, and the signal was clear. She was done with him. The man rose to go.

"Thank you for your assistance," she murmured as he left, but she was lost in thought, and did not hear his reply, if he made one.

 

**************

 

"Hold out your hand," Ambrose whispered. "Far as you can."

Cain sighed. "Doll, you know I can't reach that far..."

"Sh-shh," Ambrose said, dismissing it, face against the bars. "Do it, reach out."

Cain sighed, and slowly obliged, reaching out as far as he could, his good shoulder locked against the bars. His fingers missed the halfway point of the hallway by several inches, and Ambrose, even with his long limbs, hadn't been able to reach much farther from his side when they'd tried. They had been tantalizingly close, but more than a foot separated their fingertips from one another.

"Straighten your fingers," Ambrose said, pressed flush, "and close your eyes."

Cain obeyed, though the loss of touch was still more acute when he did, and there was a soreness inside he tried to tamp down.

He waited, and for a moment--as he expected--there was nothing. But then there was a sound, a rustling, and something moved against his fingers, a waft of coolness, the soft pressure of moisture in the air, barely substantial. Cain's breath caught in his throat, and his eyes opened on his empty fingers as he curled them towards the--the something that had touched them.

Ambrose smiled across at him, full of sad, sweet satisfaction, and closed his own eyes, drew another long breath, and blew quietly again through soft lips. There was the delay, again, and it was soft--so soft--but the air changed soon, and the stream of breath and displaced air reached him, and Cain's breath came back out in a shaken sigh, touched deeply by strange relief.

"Ambrose," he mumbled, unsure of what to say, grateful and lonely.

"Currents have a long reach," Ambrose said, smiling. "My lungs can reach farther than my hands."

Cain shook his head, at a loss for words.

But Ambrose curled to reach his hand out, then, stretched as far as he could. So Cain took a deep breath.

 

*************

 

The Queen worried her handkerchief, where she had it clutched low against her stomach under the table. It was a nervous habit she promised she would break, once the mess was over. But for now...

"I want him to rot," Azkadellia growled. "I want Glitch to spend the rest of his miserable little life down in that cell, alone and scared like I was."

"Azkadellia," the Queen murmured uncomfortably, though she laid a soothing hand (the one not preoccupied) on her daughter's arm.

"You asked what I thought was fair. He's dangerous, Mama," Azkadellia insisted, a strange coolness coming into her voice. "I won't feel safe from him unless he's locked in a tiny box where I can keep my eye on him." She tipped a few fingers through the air idly, tracing a little globe that shimmered faintly with the light of her imagining. It looked familiar.

The Queen's uneasiness settled into something harder, and she withdrew the hand to her lap, looking very carefully at her daughter. "Azkadellia..." she began again.

Azkadellia looked up and glared her challenge, her jaw set, and something there turned the Queen's belly cold, full of heavy remembering. She dug her nails into the fabric hard. But through force of will, the Queen's face smoothed. She sat up a little straighter, to match her daughter's height, tipping her chin up slightly. Her hair, now grey for far too long, pooled against the back of her chair. "Azkadellia, I think you've done quite enough of that for one lifetime."

 

***

 

DG and her mother locked hands and put their heads together, in the quietest corner of the palace they could find.

"I'm worried about her..." the Queen confided, and DG squeezed her hands. "I don't think... I don't think that we can let your sister fall into the hands of the Inspector."

DG swallowed. "Do you think... did Az do something, too?"

The Queen closed her eyes, tilted her head. "I don't know. But if the questions go on.. If we're bound by a trial... I fear we could lose them all."

DG sat back, stared at her mother with frightened eyes. "But you're the Queen. Can't you... Can't we do something?"

The Queen looked down, and nodded stiffly. "...There is something."

And when she had steeled herself, she sent for the Acting Inspector.

 

****************

 

Cain shook his head. "Now back up, Bernhaben--what do you mean, 'no trial?' What does that mean for those of us locked up? What's our recourse? You can't just leave us here to rot, you can't--"

Bernhaben interrupted to elaborate, if reluctantly. "Mister Cain, the feasibility of containment has been examined, and the Queen is satisfied that the matter has remained private enough that," and here he paused, dissatisfied, "it need not be subject to the traditional public trial. Furthermore, she sites the personal and 'family' nature of the subject, which makes it her royal prerogative to deal with it privately. Informal inquiries will be continued shortly, when the Queen has had more time to study the Princess Azkadellia's state and consider fitting justice for all involved, but formal prosecution will not go forward, and you will in all likelihood attain release or sentence shortly, at her pleasure. Therefore, my participation in the matter now ends."

Cain was too shocked to protest that any further, so Bernhaben nodded curtly and left, walk stiff and strained.

 

***

 

"One more time," Cain said, rubbing his temples against the swell of a headache.

"She's--Her Majesty has rescinded the investigation order," Ambrose began. "It means... well, that she's exercising her right as regent to be sole arbiter. While I was her advisor, she almost never did it--the Queen has always lived by the rule of law--but... " Ambrose trailed off.

Cain pinched the bridge of his nose. "So what does that mean for us? What can she do?"

Ambrose shook his head slowly. "Anything. Declare us innocent, have us hanged, let Azkadellia have her way with us, have Azkadellia hanged, release us with conditions, impose a definite sentence, impose an indefinite sentence... So long as she can demonstrate a basic consistency from her chain of evidence to her decision, it would hold up. And that's only if anyone wanted to challenge her, and no one ever challenges the regent on a matter of prerogative..."

There was a long, heavy silence, but finally Cain asked, "What kinds of conditions?"

But Ambrose was already tugging at his zipper, before Cain had even finished the question.

 

***************

 

"Please, Raw... I won't trust this to a stranger," the Queen pled.

"Can't," Raw said, simply.

DG stroked his arm fondly. "Come on," she cajoled, "you're so brave... How bad can it be in there?"

But the look in Raw's haunted eyes made her wonder if she didn't want to know.

He shook his head, slowly. "...Too bad. Not going back."

When the Queen pried into what he'd seen in Azkadellia's head, Raw got as far as this: "Briars, dark clouds, empty sickness, smoke. Hurting Glitch, hurting self, too much pain and hate and loneliness. Can't see what happened. Too dark."

After that, they couldn't bear to make him look at Ambrose.

 

***

 

DG stared at her shoes, and leaned against her mother's side, into the comfort of her arms.

"You know... I don't think I want to know what happened," she admitted, voice weak. "I don't think I could stand it. I love them all too much. I just... I don't want to know."

The Queen sighed and pet DG's hair, laying her cheek against her daughter's head. "I think..." she began slowly, but sighed, and stopped. "No. Neither do I, my darling."

 

*****************

 

DG came quietly before dawn, with the key, and unlocked both doors, one after the other.

"You can go," she said, barely loud enough to hear.

Cain stared, too stunned to even stand up.

"...We're putting it away," she explained.

Ambrose rose wordlessly, clutching his own arms and drifting into the open space of the doorway, but he couldn't seem to convince himself to step out. He wavered, one foot to the next.

Cain paused in the doorway, too, after he rose, but the promise of freedom--whatever came with it--was too much, and he took one solid step into the hall, where he could breathe a little better. He couldn't think of anything to say, though.

"Why?" Ambrose said, then covered his mouth with the glitch hand, like it wished he hadn't.

DG shook her head, still not quite looking at them. "There's no good way to fix any of this, so... so it's over. It's good to be the Princess, right?" she said, but didn't sound convinced. "I can just... make things go away, if... if I want to." Her voice trailed off.

Cain nodded, looking down at his hands.

After a heavy moment, Ambrose asked, "Azkadellia?" over the protest of his hand, voice tight and scared.

DG nodded, looked at the floor. "She's getting better. Or--she's healing up okay, anyway. She's... She's not as better as we thought she was, I guess. ...I don't know if she was ever okay."

Ambrose shook his head shortly, a little terrified jolt, and DG's eyes came up, wet and sad, but that seemed to settle something in her. She nodded, as if that answered all her questions well enough.

"No... I guess not. You..." She swallowed, and her voice was crinkling at the edges, and thick in the middle. "You guys should probably go. Maybe pretty far away. We... if we kill the investigation completely, we can't tell people you didn't do it or it didn't happen, but... at least this way we also don't have to... to risk proving anything that would make us have to hang you. So." DG shook a little, but she steeled herself. "So you should go. Somewhere you won't run into anyone from the palace and they won't run into you."

Cain remained silent. He could see the weight of the thing on DG, the terrible responsibility of it, and felt it settle onto him, too. He'd tried so hard, unthinkingly, to keep the thing from coming to light, but now that it had... The questions left unanswered, the justice left undone... He wondered if he'd feel this heavy for a long time. He wondered if his tin badge would rust, where it lay.

But when Ambrose stepped out, clutched DG in his thin arms, cried thanks into her hair, and she held onto him like an anchor, he couldn't bring himself to want anything different.

The law was over, for him, now. ...Maybe he could farm.

He wrapped his arms around them both, and when it finally slipped apart, he slid an arm around Ambrose and guided him away, quickly as he could, through the cool grey of the morning. He didn't know where they would go, but he thought he could walk a long, long way if he was doing it with Ambrose beside him.

 


	19. Epilogue

"Hand me that box of nails, Kid, I'm out up here."

Jeb did, but without looking--he was too distracted by the girl standing in his arms, by her forehead against his, by her bare feet in the grass. Cain shook his head vaguely, but couldn't begrudge them much. He got the feeling he'd be doing something similar if there weren't quite so many holes in the roof of the porch, and with the late summer rains so soon to come.

Why he was fixing this porch instead of his own, however...

"Weren't you two supposed to be making yourselves useful sanding?" he hinted. "Or pulling up the rotted boards inside so nobody goes through them and breaks a leg?"

The girl--Moura--grumbled something that sounded a lot like "grumpy," and they laughed in each other's arms, still dancing without music. But after a few long kisses (Cain politely looked away), they disengaged themselves and trudged up the porch and back to work, muttering complaints all the way.

Cain tried to keep his smile down as he called after them gruffly. "Hey, this is your porch I'm fixing, kids, if you'd rather get washed away..."

"We're going, we're going..." Jeb called, but Cain wouldn't really believe it until he heard boards break. He wouldn't hold his breath.

It wasn't until they were gone inside and safely out of the way that Ambrose came back any closer. He'd been dismantling a large and ugly metal blot on the landscape for parts, and that had kept him plenty busy.

And anyway, there was an uneasiness between him and Jeb that Cain didn't like, a stiff and stilted angularity when they spoke. But Cain let it be; they'd need time, and he wasn't going to rush them. They'd work it out for themselves. He was sure of that.

"So, you think you got enough out of that bastard to fix the water pump?"

"And the lights," Ambrose agreed, triumphantly, dropping a jumble of metal in the tall yellow grass. "And that TDESPHTL is a gold mine, I'd forgotten how complicated it was inside. I can do a million things with those parts, you wouldn't even believe."

Cain nodded, swallowing against a small lump rising in his throat. "Well. Just so long as they're in pieces, I'm happy enough," he said, and Ambrose nodded fiercely. 

"Down to bolts and scraps," Ambrose said, with a touch of vicious glee.

Cain sighed, and felt a little lighter.

"Thanks, sweetheart. The thought of those kids living here, with that stuck out there, watching over them..."

Cain didn't have to finish his thought. Ambrose knew. 

"You know," he mused, "I think I'll start carrying a spanner with me, wherever I go. Then if we find another, we can engage in a little guerilla beautification of the landscape, what do you think?"

"I think that sounds mighty fine," Cain agreed. "Hey, sunshine, you mind giving me a hand up here? If we can get this patched tonight, we can start on our roof tomorrow."

Ambrose looked unsteady, but eventually braced himself and mounted the ladder. "I'm not sure why we're fixing this place first," Ambrose admitted. "If we left them to their own devices, they might actually decide to _do_ something with the place, rather than disappear and canoodle at all hours."

Cain laughed on his breath. "No, they'd keep canoodling and then just canoodle in the rain when it started coming in their ceiling." He shrugged. "They're young."

"They're not that young," Ambrose disagreed, for the sake of it. "Maybe I should decide to be young. Then you can cater to my whims and save me from myself when I flounce about willy-nilly."

Cain raised an eyebrow. "And how's that any different from now?"

"...Well, I'd be younger," Ambrose finally decided.

 

***

 

Cain and Ambrose packed up late, after a quiet but mostly comfortable dinner at Moura's table, trundling their tools and scraps into their two-wheeled cart.

The cart was most of what they'd brought with them, when they'd left the palace, that day, with what little they salvaged from the damaged cottage. There wasn't much that seemed fitting to take; most of it had been there when they'd arrived, and was still there when they left.

They brought Ambrose's books, his notes and papers and blueprints, and they brought his fine tools. They brought Cain's axe, and the shovels and spades from the gardens, the clothes they could salvage, and whatever they could harvest half-ripe from the patch of earth. A few plates and cups, a tea-set Ambrose had glued back together so many times it wasn't worth leaving, and enough silverware to eat with, and they were gone.

Their lives had seemed so small, then.

But when they'd started out down the path, through the town and on towards the next, they'd started to seem much bigger. The road somehow made everything feel infinite, broken open and full of bright space.

They breathed easier than they had in months.

Jeb and Moura had caught up with them a few days later, though they'd had a truck and everything inside it for their baggage. Neither pair explained themselves, but it had become clear soon enough that they were all headed for the old home, the old village, and so they traveled together.

Cain couldn't bear the thought of living in his house--Adora's house--now, but Moura had fallen in love with it on first sight, so Jeb had staked his claim. Cain had wished them well. There were several more abandoned houses within a few hours' walk--there were too many, in this part of the country--and after a few questions around the tiny village nearest them, Cain and Ambrose had settled on one about a mile and a half out from Jeb's. One that was small, but still had the bones of a farm beneath it, and where the plumbing seemed to be intact.

And that had been that.

Ambrose still complained of the walk, every time they took it, but seemed to mean it less and less every time.

Cain hoped that whenever he and Jeb made their peace, he might give up the argument altogether, but he wasn't going to hold his breath for that, either.

When they settled in for the night, it was in the bed they'd wheedled out of a junk dealer in the town, in sheets they'd bought used and old but soft. It was a bed big enough for two, this time, and they hadn't discussed that, either. They would make that work, too.

The dust overhead was evil, but Ambrose liked the way the light through the window caught it in the early morning, turning the cobwebs gold and the dust motes in the air into a shimmering cloud, so they left it where it lay on the ceilings and eaves--for now. They baked in the heat (there were so many holes in the slats of the walls that it wasn't much better than being outside), and they'd chill in the winter, but they'd get to that when they could.

For now, it was enough to lie together, knees to knees and forehead to forehead, with an idle hand tracing patterns on the mattress between them. It was enough to be here, in the quiet of the night, with the sound of the wind coming through the tall grass and sighing through the walls, sweet and low.


End file.
